Gifts to Fund J-PAL and IRD Incentives for Immunization Studies - 2016 Cost-effectiveness Update

Published: August 2016

When we recommended a gift to support incentives for immunization replication studies in 2015, we wrote:

One of our major remaining questions about the incentives for immunization program is whether it is as cost-effective as our other priority programs. We did some initial work on this question, but found that the cost-effectiveness analyses seemed to be highly sensitive to a few core assumptions that would have taken substantial research capacity to analyze properly (more). Due to constraints on our capacity, we have deprioritized further investigation into these questions but have recommended these gifts in the hopes of returning to them in the future.

We subsequently retained IDinsight (http://idinsight.org/) to analyze the cost-effectiveness of this program. We reviewed IDinsight's work and constructed our own model.

This effort has significantly increased our interest in the program: its cost-effectiveness appears to be competitive with our priority programs (~$5,000-8,000 per under-5-life saved).

Note that this analysis relies on the vaccines included in the original randomized controlled trial completed in 2007 and does not incorporate new vaccines (e.g., rotavirus and pneumococcal) that would likely be part of a future program. Including those vaccines would likely improve our cost-effectiveness estimate substantially.

Three files provide additional information: