Economic evaluation of vaccination programme of 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine to the birth cohort in Japan

Aiming to introduce 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PVC-7) into routine vaccination schedule, the government of Japan gives a temporary budget to encourage municipalities in launching public vaccination programme which started on November 26, 2010 and ends on March 31, 2012. This study aims to appraise the 'value for money' of PCV-7 vaccination programme from the societal perspective and the budget impact from the perspective of municipalities, which is responsible for providing routine vaccination. We conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis with Markov modelling and calculated incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) value of launching such programme with two levels of co-payment, ¥1000 (US$13) or ¥0, and two scenarios of the uptake of vaccine (vaccinated-alone or co-vaccinated with other vaccines). We found that when vaccinated-alone, ICERs in QALY were ¥7,441,000 (US$93,013) or ¥9,065,000 (US$113,313), and when co-vaccinated ¥7,441,000 (US$93,013) or ¥5,489,000 (US$68,613), without or with productivity loss, respectively, regardless of co-payment level of the programme. Co-vaccinated programmes had lower ICER than vaccinated-alone programmes due to the savings in productivity loss. By adopting WHO's classification that an intervention is 'cost-effective' if ICER (in QALY) is between 1 and 3 times of GDP as a criterion, PCV-7 vaccination programme in Japan is concluded as "cost-effective" from the perspective of society. The introduction of either no co-payment or ¥1000 (US$13) co-payment vaccination programme appears to be not budget saving for the first 6 years, whereas the level of budget impact are less than ¥11,000,000 (US$137,500) or ¥8,500,000 (US$106,250), respectively, for a municipality with 1000 birth cohort in the 1st year and 2nd to 5th year birth cohort proportional to the birth cohort population of estimated future population.