Impact of Vaccines; Health, Economic and Social Perspectives

 

The development, approval, and introduction of vaccines as part of large routine immunization programs began to eradicate health inequalities around the world. Yet as of this writing, access to vaccines that prevent life-threatening infectious diseases remains uneven for all infants, children, and adults around the world. This is a problem that many people and agencies around the world are working hard on. As physicians and biomedical scientists, we often focus on the health benefits that vaccines provide to prevent disease and death from infectious pathogens. Here we discuss the health, economic and social benefits of vaccines that have been identified and studied in recent years and that affect all regions and all age groups. After learning of the emergence of the SARSCoV2 virus in December 2019 and recognizing its potential for global spread as a trigger for the COVID19 disease, there was an urgent need to develop vaccines at an unprecedented rate and scale. As we estimate and quantify the health, economic and social benefits of vaccines and immunization programs for individuals and society, we must strive to communicate this to the general public and to policy makers for the benefit of disease endemic, epidemic and pandemic The development of safe and effective vaccination against diseases that cause significant morbidity and mortality is one of the most important scientific advances of the 21st century. Vaccines, along with clean water and sanitation, are public health measures that are indisputably responsible for better health outcomes around the world. Vaccines are estimated to have prevented 6 million deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases annually (Ehreth, 2003). The world population is estimated at nearly 10 billion people by 2055 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2019), an achievement that can be attributed in part to effective vaccines that prevent disease and extend life expectancy in all continents. However, much remains to be done to ensure the financing, delivery, distribution and administration of vaccines to all sectors of the population, especially hard-to-reach sectors of the population, including those who are skeptical about their protective value and affected. for disasters. Agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Coalition for the Epidemic Preparedness Initiative (CEPI) have contributed significantly to profits with their diverse sources of funding for vaccines for all. This importance of these organizations for global engagement and collaboration was crucial given the health and economic impact of COVID19 on societies in high-, middle- and low-income countries in the context of the global SARSCoV2 pandemic in 2019. This review will highlight the benefits of vaccination for society from a social, economic and health fabric perspective (Figure 1) that should be taken into account in the overall impact assessment to ensure