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 U.S. 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 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.
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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.
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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.”
