New COVID-19 Vaccines, Its Cost and Shelf Life: A Cost Effectiveness Analysis.

Dear editor

The new COVID-19 vaccines become the hope for containing COVID-19 pandemic (1,2). As noted by Ita, many mRNA and DNA vaccines are under trails and the success is expected (1). At present, there are some newly proposed COVID-19 vaccines. As a new vaccine, there are many considerations including to the cost, effectiveness, and feasibility for usage in clinical settings. The different costs and effectiveness of different vaccines might be important factor for decision making for implementation of a new vaccination (3). Additionally, the vaccine that is appropriate for clinical usage, simple for keeping and administration, should be selected. Here, the authors would like to add up on the considerations regarding new COVID-19 vaccines. The authors reappraised on the new day on the five new COVID-19 vaccines (such as Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, Moderna vaccine, Oxford–Astrazeneca vaccine, Sputnik 5 and Sinovac). Cost effectiveness analysis according to standard medical economic analysis is done. The cost is directly referred to the proposed cost for a complete vaccination for a person. The effectiveness is assigned according to the reported efficacy and shelf life at simple refrigerator, which is the general condition for vaccine keeping in local clinical setting. Here, the effectiveness is adjusted from reported efficacy according to shelf life and defined as “efficacy x shelf-life period in day”. The final cost per effectiveness, cost-effectiveness value, is calculated. According to the analysis, the results are shown in Table 1 . According to the analysis, different cost-effectiveness values are derived, and this might be a good data for decision making for selection of appropriate new COVID-19 vaccine for usage in each setting. Nevertheless, the data on the safety and reported adverse effect of the vaccines must be continuously collected for further repeated reappraisal analysis after the post marketing real use.

Table 1

Cost effectiveness analysis of new COVID-19 vaccines

COVID-19 vaccines	Cost (USD)	Effectiveness (%)	Cost-effectiveness (USD)
A	40	4.5	8.89
B	60	28.5	2.11
C	50	27	1.85
D	20	27.6	0.72
E	145	27	5.37