How cost-effective might developing new vaccines be? GAVI, the leading funder for vaccine-related work, is cited by a few different sources as potentially saving a life for under $1000, though this estimate is not robust and this estimate is not related solely to work on developing new vaccines.

It is reported anecdotally to take 12-15 years to discover new medicine (Light, Andrus, & Warburton, 2009), though it’s not clear what this estimate is based on or how this generalize to vaccines. Instead, maybe we could look more at the vaccine lifecycle. For a vaccine to be successful, it has to be successfully developed and then tested through pre-clincal stages, three stages of clinical trials with increasing sample sizes, and then be registered and licensed.

Read the full article at Effective Altruism Forum

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This essay was jointly written by Peter Hurford and Marcus Davis.