On the Herd Effects in Vaccine Pharmacoeconomic Research to the Prevention of Infectious Disease and Its Application to Pcv and Hpv Vaccines

Vaccination is the front-line of epidemic prevention, posing a crucial influence on disease control. Mass vaccination not only provides direct effects that reduce disease incidence in those immunized but also protects the unvaccinated against infection, which is known as indirect effects or herd-immunity effects. Although vaccine effectiveness is a major concern, the limited government budget and medical resources remain important for the policy makers. Methodologies in pharmacoeconomics such as cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and cost-utility analysis (CUA) are commonly used for economic evaluations of health prevention and intervention. Moreover, the results of both CEA and CUA are shown to be greatly affected by herd-immunity effects, a phenomenon which is difficult to quantify. In view of this, we propose a statistical and mathematical model to quantify herd-immunity effects using Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model and to incorporate the results to pharmacoeconomic analysis. Empirical data analyses will also be applied to cost-effectiveness analysis of Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine (PCV) and cost-utility analysis of Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Epidemiological and cost data related to those two diseases are to be collected using the National Health Insurance Database, as are systematic review and meta-analysis for parameter estimations in model-building.

Project ID:PC9709-0201
External Project ID:NSC97-2320-B182-004-MY3