Routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented hundreds of millions of illnesses, tens of millions of hospitalizations and more than 1 million deaths among people born between 1994 and 2023, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A new report, published Thursday by the CDC, analyzed the benefits of routine childhood immunizations in the United States through the CDC’s Vaccines for Children Program, which launched in 1994. The research also found that the vaccinations saved the country billions of dollars.
The study “shows the substantial impact of vaccines on peoples’ lives and the impressive return on the investment in vaccines and immunization services,” Fangjun Zhou, lead author of the paper and a scientist at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in an email.
“The substantial benefits of childhood vaccinations have been well known for a long time. One new contribution of this study is that, overall, these benefits continue even as newer vaccines have been added to the childhood schedule,” Zhou added. “Staying up to date with recommended childhood vaccines is one of the best ways to prevent disease, reduce the burden on the health care system and in many cases also reduce health care costs.”
The researchers, from the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, examined and quantified the health benefits and economic impact of routine immunizations among children in the United States born between 1994 and last year.
Nine vaccines were included in the analysis: diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis or DTaP; Haemophilus influenzae type b or Hib; poliovirus; measles, mumps and rubella; hepatitis B; varicella; hepatitis A; pneumococcal conjugate and rotavirus. Some other common vaccines, including flu, Covid-19 and RSV immunizations, were not included in the analysis.
The researchers estimated how many children were vaccinated using data from National Immunization Surveys and school vaccination surveys. Disease cases and deaths were estimated using data from the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System.
The researchers found that among about 117 million children born from 1994 through 2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented some 508 million cases of illness through the children’s lifetimes, 32 million hospitalizations and about 1.13 million deaths.
The cumulative number of illnesses prevented in the study ranged from about 5,000 cases for tetanus to around 100 million for measles and varicella.
The greatest estimated cumulative number of hospitalizations and deaths prevented was about 13.2 million hospitalizations for measles and about 752,800 deaths for diphtheria, the researchers wrote.
Their analysis also found that routine childhood vaccinations among children born between 1994 and 2023 yielded a net savings of $540 billion in direct costs, such as the medical care costs of treating an infection, and $2.7 trillion in societal costs, such as parents missing work to care for a sick child.
The new report is a “testament to the success” of vaccinations for preventing diseases, Dr. Sara Siddiqui, a pediatrician at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone in New York, said in an email.
“These are vaccinations that are currently recommended in the childhood vaccination series and also are provided at reduced cost as part of the Vaccines For Children Program. I am very pleased and grateful to see this study being performed to report the health benefits of vaccinations as a way to prevent disease,” wrote Siddiqui, who was not involved in the new report.
“My job as a pediatrician is to keep children healthy and out of the hospital. Vaccinations are a way to keep children healthy and prevent severity of disease,” she added. “I encourage all parents to continually have a conversation and discussion with their pediatrician about each vaccine that their child is due for as well as the specific disease that it would help in preventing.”
A decades-old program
The CDC’s Vaccines for Children program was established after the country experienced a measles epidemic from 1989 through 1991. That outbreak resulted in tens of thousands of infections and hundreds of deaths. The CDC investigated the situation and found that more than half of the children who had measles at the time had not been vaccinated.
The Vaccines for Children program was launched in 1994 to provide vaccines at no cost to eligible people 18 and younger. Last year, more than half – about 54% – of children were eligible to receive vaccines through the program, according to the new report.
“VFC plays an important role in maintaining high childhood vaccination coverage by reducing barriers to access, especially in geographic areas and among populations that have historically had lower vaccination coverage, such as children living in rural areas,” the researchers wrote.
“Immunization programs might consider expanding their provider network by using nontraditional vaccine providers such as pharmacies in areas where access is deemed to be inadequate,” the researchers added. “Further, provider reminders, provider assessment and feedback, and client reminder-recall systems remain important methods to reduce missed opportunities for vaccination.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, routine childhood vaccination coverage declined in part due to reduced access to primary care services and the increased spread of misinformation, leading to vaccine hesitancy.
There was a significant decline in routine childhood vaccinations globally as well during the Covid-19 pandemic. Data released in July by the World Health Organization and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund shows that the world has yet to recover.
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This stagnation reflects ongoing challenges with disruptions in health-care services, logistical challenges, vaccine hesitancy and inequities in access to services, the organizations said at the time.
Their data revealed that previous progress in reaching pre-pandemic immunization levels has stalled. For instance, worldwide coverage of the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP3) vaccine was 84% in 2023, the same as in 2022 but below the 86% recorded in 2019.
The pandemic signified a “historic backslide,” Dr. Katherine O’Brien, director of the Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biological at WHO, said at the time. The race is now on to reach children who missed shots during the pandemic and to restore and strengthen immunization services beyond pre-pandemic levels.
CNN’s Maya Davis contributed to this report.
