A Forum held at the National Press Club http://press.org unveiled the February 2016 Health Affairs www.healthaffairs.org issue on topics related to vaccines. Health Affairs Editor-in-Chief Alan R. Weil reports that the gap between what potential vaccines offer and what we actually achieve is determined by social, economic, political, and health system factors.
According to many in the field, managing costs is one of the most important issues related to maintaining effective vaccination programs. It is reported that although donors can support the spread of vaccines, sustaining gains made will ultimately require low and middle income countries to contribute financially to sustain the health of their populations.
Researchers found that childhood immunizations result in 16 to 44 times the investment. Sachiko Ozawa of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health www.jhsph.edu and coauthors of a study found that every dollar invested in vaccines during the decade was estimated to result in a return of sixteen times the costs while taking into account treatment costs and productivity losses.
The estimates were derived by looking not only at vaccine costs but also supply chain and service delivery costs as compared to the associated economic benefits of implementing vaccination programs in 94 low and middle income countries.
An article by Thomas J. Hwang, a venture capitalist at Bain Capital www.baincapital.com and Aaron S. Kessleheim an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard www.harvard.edu reports that the vaccine pipeline has grown during the past two decades with more early-stage trials from small and medium size companies.
Their research findings suggest that policy-making targeted at smaller companies, such as prizes or opportunities for public-private partnerships, could support the development of new vaccines, particularly those targeting unmet medical needs and emerging public health threats.
Technology can also help to sustain vaccination programs. One of the articles titled “Publicly Available Online Tool Facilitates Real-Time Monitoring of Vaccine Conversations and Sentiments” by Chi Y. Bahk Director of Epidemico in Boston http://epidemico.com, examined how real-time monitoring and social media can help inform public health practitioners and policy makers on issues related to vaccines.
A specific platform for monitoring vaccination-related content called the “Vaccine Sentimeter” provides real-time surveillance and trend analyses of conversations on vaccines found in mainstream and social media.
The monitoring is visualized in a web-based dashboard that displays data. The online tool powered by the HealthMap platform www.healthmap.org pulls intelligence from 100,000 plus online sources including social media, news aggregators, blogs, eyewitness reports, expert-curated discussions, and validated official reports to provide a unified and comprehensive view of the current global conversation on vaccines.
The developers of the online tool envision the tool to be used routinely by vaccine program coordinators and public health professionals to track and understand the local conversation around vaccination and vaccine preventable diseases.