The full health, economic, and social benefits of prospective Strep A vaccination.

Recent research has documented a wide range of health, economic, and social benefits conferred by vaccination, beyond the direct reductions in morbidity, mortality, and future healthcare costs traditionally captured in economic evaluations. In this paper, we describe the societal benefits that would likely stem from widespread administration of safe and effective vaccines against Streptococcus pyogenes (Strep A), which was estimated to be the fifth-leading cause of infectious disease deaths globally prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We then estimate the global societal gains from prospective Strep A vaccination through a value-per-statistical-life approach.

Causes and costs of global COVID-19 vaccine inequity.

Despite the rapid development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines and the widely recognized health and economic benefits of vaccination, there exist stark differences in vaccination rates across country income groups. While more than 70% of the population is fully vaccinated in high-income countries, vaccination rates in low-income countries are only around 30%. The paper reviews the factors behind global COVID-19 vaccine inequity and the health, social, and economic costs triggered by this inequity.

The macroeconomic burden of noncommunicable diseases and mental health conditions in South America.

Noncommunicable diseases and mental health conditions (referred to collectively as NMHs) are the greatest cause of preventable death, illness, and disability in South America and negatively affect countries' economic performance through their detrimental impacts on labor supply and capital investments. Sound, evidence-based policy-making requires a deep understanding of the macroeconomic costs of NMHs and of their distribution across countries and diseases. The paper estimates and projects the macroeconomic burden of NMHs over the period 2020-2050 in 10 South American countries.

Optimal global spending for group A Streptococcus vaccine research and development.

Group A Streptococcus (Strep A) leads to 600,000 deaths and 600 million cases of pharyngitis annually. Although long a promising target for vaccine development, how much funding should be allocated to develop a Strep A vaccine is unclear. We aim to calculate the optimal amount of global spending for Strep A vaccine development, the resulting benefits, and the social rate of return on this spending.

The benefits and costs of U.S. employer COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

In 2021, the Biden Administration issued mandates requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for U.S. federal employees and contractors and for some healthcare and private sector workers.

Factors underlying COVID-19 vaccine and booster hesitancy and refusal, and incentivizing vaccine adoption.

The paper investigates the factors underlying COVID-19 vaccine and booster hesitancy in the United States, and the efficacy of various incentives or disincentives to expand uptake. We use cross-sectional, national survey data on 3,497 U.S.

Correction: Social determinants of mortality from COVID-19: A simulation study using NHANES.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.

Climate action with revenue recycling has benefits for poverty, inequality and well-being.

Existing estimates of optimal climate policy ignore the possibility that carbon tax revenues could be used in a progressive way; model results therefore typically imply that near-term climate action comes at some cost to the poor. Using the Nested Inequalities Climate Economy (NICE) model, we show that an equal per capita refund of carbon tax revenues implies that achieving a 2°C target can pay large and immediate dividends for improving well-being, reducing inequality and alleviating poverty. In an optimal policy calculation that weighs the benefits against the costs of mitigation, the recommended policy is characterized by aggressive near-term climate action followed by a slower climb towards full decarbonization; this pattern-which is driven by a carbon revenue Laffer curve-prevents runaway warming while also preserving tax revenues for redistribution.

COVID-19 Vaccine Allocation: Modeling Health Outcomes and Equity Implications of Alternative Strategies.

Given the scarcity of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, a chief policy question is how to allocate them among different sociodemographic groups. This paper evaluates COVID-19 vaccine prioritization strategies proposed to date, focusing on their stated goals; the mechanisms through which the selected allocations affect the course and burden of the pandemic; and the main epidemiological, economic, logistical, and political issues that arise when setting the prioritization strategy. The paper uses a simple, age-stratified susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered model applied to the United States to quantitatively assess the performance of alternative prioritization strategies with respect to avoided deaths, avoided infections, and life-years gained.

The Societal Value of Vaccination in the Age of COVID-19.

In recent years, academics and policymakers have increasingly recognized that the full societal value of vaccination encompasses broad health, economic, and social benefits beyond avoided morbidity and mortality due to infection by the targeted pathogen and limited health care costs. Nevertheless, standard economic evaluations of vaccines continue to focus on a relatively narrow set of health-centric benefits, with consequences for vaccination policies and public investments.The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates in stark terms the multiplicity and magnitude of harms that infectious diseases may inflict on society.

Social determinants of mortality from COVID-19: A simulation study using NHANES.

Background: The COVID-19 epidemic in the United States is widespread, with more than 200,000 deaths reported as of September 23, 2020. While ecological studies show higher burdens of COVID-19 mortality in areas with higher rates of poverty, little is known about social determinants of COVID-19 mortality at the individual level.

Methods And Findings: We estimated the proportions of COVID-19 deaths by age, sex, race/ethnicity, and comorbid conditions using their reported univariate proportions among COVID-19 deaths and correlations among these variables in the general population from the 2017-2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

Fair innings? The utilitarian and prioritarian value of risk reduction over a whole lifetime.

The social value of risk reduction (SVRR) is the marginal social value of reducing an individual's fatality risk, as measured by some social welfare function (SWF). This Article investigates SVRR, using a lifetime utility model in which individuals are differentiated by age, lifetime income profile, and lifetime risk profile. We consider both the utilitarian SWF and a "prioritarian" SWF, which applies a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation to individual utility.

Valuing Health Impacts In Climate Policy: Ethical Issues And Economic Challenges.

Deciding which climate policies to enact, and where and when to enact them, requires weighing their costs against the expected benefits. A key challenge in climate policy is how to value health impacts, which are likely to be large and varied, considering that they will accrue over long time horizons (centuries), will occur throughout the world, and will be distributed unevenly within countries depending in part on socioeconomic status. These features raise a number of important economic and ethical issues including how to value human life in different countries at different levels of development, how to value future people, and how much priority to give the poor and disadvantaged.