Using PATH’s Vaccine Cost Calculators to inform immunization decision-making

For country-level policymakers, the opportunity to introduce a new vaccine comes with many considerations. Is the vaccine needed? What are the benefits? Is there enough capacity in the cold chain system? Often most important—what will it cost, and can our country afford it? Adding complexity to complexity, new vaccine products and new formulations of existing vaccines continue to be developed and commercialized, which can make decisions more daunting when a country is choosing which vaccine product to introduce or switch to. PATH’s new Vaccine Cost Calculators https://www.path.org/programs/center-for-vaccine-innovation-and-access/vaccine-cost-calculators-resources-inform-immunization-decision-making/ can help, providing an easy way for country-level decision-makers to assess and compare the costs of certain vaccination programs over a period of 10 years with each vaccine product available in the global market. These Excel-based tools are currently available in English, French, Russian, and Spanish for rotavirus vaccines and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines. A calculator for human papillomavirus vaccines is coming in 2021, with potentially more to follow. PATH’s Frédéric Debellut will share the rationale and process behind the development of these tools and provide a demonstration of how to actually use the tools, allowing lots of time for questions and comments from webinar participants.

Speaker: Frédéric Debellut is a senior health economist at PATH’s Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access. He is responsible for the design and conduct of economic analyses with the objective to generate and translate economic evidence that informs donor investments, global policy, and country vaccine introduction decisions. His work encompasses cost of delivery and cost-effectiveness studies, budget impact analyses, and demand forecasting, and focuses on vaccines against rotavirus, typhoid, human papillomavirus, meningitis A, and seasonal influenza.