Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Could COVID-19 be more efficacious than effective? This could be the case if individuals receiving COVID-19 engaged in ‘risk compensation’. In short, without a COVID-19 vaccine, individuals may have refrained from travel and engaged in social distancing. After a COVID-19 vaccine, these same individuals could have been more likely to travel and less likely to…
In part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination have become a hot button issue. This is true even for non-COVID vaccines that have proven significant health benefits, such as those for human papillomavirus vaccines (HPV). Although betweeen 2016 and 2021 the share of teenagers receiving their HPV vaccination series increased from 60% to 77%, Bloomberg…
COVID-19 vaccines have had a huge beneficial impact on patient health. One study found that between December 2020 and June 2021, COVID-19 vaccines saved 240,000 lives (Vilches et al. 2022). The figure below shows that as the Delta and Omicron variants spread in the fall of 2021, COVID-19 vaccines prevented significant number of deaths according…
Today teams in the National Football League (NFL) made their final roster cuts. In most years, your ability to make the final roster of an NFL team is dependent on one factor: how well can you play football. This year, however, some teams used additional criteria to determine whether a player made the team. ESPN…
An interesting result from Courbage and Peter (2021): …uncertainty about the probability of side effects and the efficacy of the vaccine always reduces take-up under ambiguity aversion. However, uncertainty about the underlying disease, being the probability of sickness or the probability of a severe course of disease, may either encourage or discourage vaccination. Because vaccination…
How does Medicare cover vaccines? Are the paid for by Medicare Part B or Part D? MedPAC’s June 2021 report provides a nice overview. Medicare covers vaccines under Part B and Part D. Part B covers vaccines for influenza, pneumococcal disease, hepatitis B (for patients at high or intermediate risk), and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19),…
That was the conclusion of The Economist on his decision to suspend intellectual property protections for the makers of COVID-19 vaccines. In the article “Ten million reasons to vaccinate the world“, they write: Many experts argue that, because some manufacturing capacity is going begging, millions more doses might become available if patent-owners shared their secrets,…
This weekend I received my second COVID-19 vaccine. While I certainly feel lucky to live in a country with ample vaccine supply, other countries are not so lucky. Let’s take a look at the numbers from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. These numbers are updated through May 2, 2021. First, you’ll see that…
How can we best accelerate vaccine availability? This is the question that Ahuja et al. (2021) try to answer in their Becker-Friedman Institute (BFI) working paper. First, they state the obvious: the cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is large. Specifically: Each month, the COVID pandemic kills 300,000 people (as of Jan. 2021) and reduces global…
Who should get the COVID-19 vaccine first? Since I am an economist, let’s try to figure this out mathematically. Let’s give each person or group of people a score or ranking and vaccinate each individual in priority. One key factor, is that we should the vaccine to the people most at risk for the disease.…