These Are the Huge Societal Benefits of Childhood Vaccination

In 1994, the United States, fresh off a measles epidemic, instituted the Vaccines for Children program to ensure that all children, regardless of income, could get vaccinated. The payoff? 731,700 lives over the past two decades.

Let that sink in for a moment. In a report released today, the Centers for Disease Control says that the program, which is funded through Medicare and Medicaid, has had a staggering effect. You can see it in the vaccination rate alone: In the late 1980s, roughly 70 percent of children were vaccinated for common childhood illnesses—after the program was started, that number jumped well over 90 percent. Take a look:

The vaccines will prevent, according to the CDC,

• 322 million illnesses
• 21 million hospitalizations
• 731,700 deaths

Those reductions will save roughly $295 billion in direct hospitalization and other costs associated with disease and will save $1.38 trillion in total society costs, the organization says.

“Economic analysis for 2009 alone found that each dollar invested in vaccines and administration, on average, resulted in $3 in direct benefits and $10 in benefits when societal costs are included,” the report concluded.

Not to spike the football, or anything, but the report goes on to say that the limitations of the report mean that, if anything, these numbers are an underestimation: “First, the benefits of hepatitis A vaccine, annual childhood influenza vaccine, and adolescent vaccines were not included. Second, the model did not account for all indirect vaccine effects on disease burden; for some vaccines, reduced transmission to unvaccinated populations has been a powerful driver of cost-effectiveness.”

To be completely fair, the report notes that improved living conditions and other factors may have resulted in a reduction in total diphtheria cases.

Anyways, if the numbers are to be believed, the United States’ vaccine program has been an immense success. The only thing threatening it has been a resurgence in the anti-vaccine crowd who are still clinging to the notion that vaccines could cause autism, a claim that has been wholly thrown out by science.

Other anti-vaxxers believe that there’s a greater risk that one-in-a-million side effects will kill their children, rather than the disease itself. Unfortunately, that side has gained enough traction to cause some real harm—last year, there were 189 cases of measles in the United States, the second highest in the last 13 years and more than three times the average of 60 cases that the CDC says has been normal since measles was “eliminated” in 2000.

In any case, the goal of any vaccine campaign is to confer "herd immunity" to a community—that is, once enough people get vaccinated, enough people become immune to the disease to keep it completely out of any given population. Not vaccinating your kids directly impedes the achievement of that goal, and perhaps screws with your neighbor's kid who happened to not get a vaccination because of some extenuating circumstance.

Finding out the true impact of the anti-vaccination movement is a bit tricky, because these things tend to take a while to show up in the numbers, but the anti-anti-vaxxing crowd (the pro-vaxxers?) says that 2007 is when people like Jenny McCarthy and other celebrities began speaking out against vaccines. These charts over here show some of the small increases in preventable diseases since then.

Using Google Trends to measure the popularity of anything is also a bit problematic, but it looks like people are searching for "anti-vaccine" with more regularity than ever.

Expect the vaccination debate to continue, despite the clear benefits of widespread vaccination programs.