Life Expectancy of 600 years needed to make COVID vaccine cost-effective for those under 30
Ignoring adverse effects on health to gaze at adverse effects on financial well-being
If you ignore the adverse effects of COVID vaccines on human health, and just look at the adverse effects of COVID vaccines on human “wallets” (cost-effectiveness analysis), you come up awful short.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra recently gave a presentation showing the number you’d need to vaccinate (NNV) in order to prevent one Omicron death, and even in those over age 80 it was already in the several thousands of vaccinations required — just so as to prevent one single death.
If about $50 is allocated for the procurement and administration costs of a COVID vaccination, then the cost to save a human life can be compared to other medical interventions.
Good medical interventions are able to save a year of life for twice or less of one’s annual income. But COVID vaccination, especially in the young, is much more expensive than that.
It’s important to be cost-effective because it means you get the most health for your money — rather than wasting much money on a treatment which does very little for you in the first place. If resources were unlimited, it wouldn’t matter how cost-effective medical treatments were.
Because resources are limited, analyzing the cost-effectiveness of your options is vital for saving lives while constrained to our current means to do so.
As you can see, in order for COVID vaccination to be cost-effective for those under age 30, they would have to expect another 562 years of life (so that preventing a death would save them 562 years of life, at a cost of $39 million).
$39,000,000 / 562 = $69,395 per life-year saved (cost-effective medical treatment).
Those under age 40 would need to expect to live over 240 years after COVID vaccination, in order for their use of COVID vaccines to be considered cost-effective. Even those under age 50 would need to have 120 years of life remaining, just for COVID vaccine to be cost-effective under Omicron.
Reference
[World Council for Heath Press Conference, featuring Dr. Aseem Malhotra] — https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/shows/chdtv-exclusive-interviews/8H5dl9Coxw
[Truly cost-effective medicine saves a life-year for no more than twice the annual income] — Garber AM, Phelps CE. Economic foundations of cost-effectiveness analysis. J Health Econ. 1997 Feb;16(1):1-31. doi: 10.1016/s0167-6296(96)00506-1. PMID: 10167341. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10167341/
Quote:
We have presented an alternative method for picking the optimal cutoff, showing how it can he derived from the parameters of a flexible utility function. Our estimates imply that, over the range we estimated, CE [cost-effectiveness] cutoffs should be about double the annual income.