Industry Perspectives: Ensuring Vaccination of Children and Adolescents Without Financial Barriers

Abstract

The availability of an expanding range of safe and efficacious vaccines against important infectious diseases has created unprecedented opportunities to improve public health and to save lives. With the widespread implementation of many of these vaccines in the United States, impressive reductions in rates of morbidity and death attributable to vaccine-preventable diseases have been achieved and substantial cost savings realized.1,2 Building on the tremendous public health benefits of today's vaccines, advances in technology are enabling the development of vaccines for diseases once considered out of reach of biomedical prevention efforts. These vaccines include new or improved vaccines for the prevention of human papillomavirus-associated diseases, meningococcal meningitis, invasive pneumococcal disease, and rotavirus gastroenteritis. Despite these exciting biomedical and public health advances, significant proportions of children, adolescents, and adults in the United States encounter financial barriers to full access to recommended vaccines and vaccination services. The fact that funding for immunization programs has not kept up with the range and number of important new vaccines that recently have been licensed and recommended for use for children, adolescents, and adults is an issue of significant contemporary concern.3 As a result, and within the context of broader challenges and inequities in the US health care system, many individuals … Address correspondence to Mark Feinberg, MD, PhD, FACP, Merck Vaccines and Infectious Diseases, Merck, Medical Affairs and Policy, 770 Sumneytown Pike, PO Box 4, West Point, PA 19486. E-mail: mark_feinberg{at}merck.com