Intradermal versus intramuscular COVID-19 vaccination aiming at protection for delta variant: cost utility analysis

Rujittika Mungmunpuntipantip¹, Viroj Wiwanitkit²,  
¹ Private Academic Consultant, Bangkok, Thailand
² Department of Community Medicine, Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidhyapeeth, Pune, Maharashtra, India

Correspondence Address:
Rujittika Mungmunpuntipantip
Private Academic Consultant, 111 Bangkok 122 Bangkok 103300
Thailand

Full Text



Sir,

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) remains a big global problem and no effective method is yet available for disease containment.[1] One of the possible good approaches for the management COVID-19 pandemic crisis is using the COVID-19 vaccine.[2] Mass COVID-19 vaccination is now accepted as the best option for containment of the disease outbreak. Vaccine inoculation is a good medical preventive manipulation against the new viral disease. COVID-19 immunization is widely used and its efficacy for disease prevention is proposed. In general practice, overall two doses of COVID-19 vaccines are given to the vaccine recipient. There are two intramuscular vaccination doses required. By giving the COVID-19 vaccine to the vaccine recipient in a different way, many scientists have given ideas for risk reduction and given the solution to the insufficient vaccine supply situation. The novel choice of COVID-19 immunization's cost, usefulness, and safety are all important aspects to consider. In this study, the authors performed a medical economics study aiming at comparing the cost per utility of various options of vaccination. The new intradermal COVID-19 vaccine administration as well as the classical technique, intramuscular administration, are evaluated.

The authors used a cost-utility analysis in this study. The technique is used for examining the cost and utility of the vaccination. The COVID-19 vaccines that will be offered to the general population are focused on and evaluated. The cost is calculated based on publicly accessible information, as was already said. The stated vaccine efficacy from the earlier comparison trial is mentioned in terms of utility. The usefulness is defined as the titer of neutralizing antibodies at 1 month after getting the COVID-19 vaccine. Based on the referring report, the utility of alternative intradermal and normal intramuscular COVID-19 vaccine injection is 353% and 563%, orderly.[3] Publicly available data have already been mentioned as the main source of the study. In the analysis, the data on vaccination cost, which is publicly accessible, are categorized as a cost. In this study, the suggested vaccine efficacy is hereby categorized as a utility. The required cost for the utility of each studied immunization approach is assessed.

The unit cost per unit utility in case that intradermal COVID-19 vaccine immunization technique is employed is lower according to cost-utility analysis (0.019 vs. 0.061 Euro for intradermal vs. intramuscular). The medical economics approach is used in this work for analyzing the cost and utility of the new immunization methods. The price of immunization is hereby set as cost, whereas the observed efficacy of vaccination after giving it to the vaccine recipient is assigned as utility for the present study. Each vaccine injection's cost per utility is found, then the comparison between derived cost per utility value of the technique is done. Adverse effect after immunization is another important concern. It can show that immunization techniques that can provide a safe clinical outcome at with a lower cost should be more favorable. Based on this study, the cost per utility for protection against the delta variant from intradermal vaccination is 3.21 times lower than that of intramuscular vaccination. It might be wise to implement intradermal COVID-19 vaccine policy aiming at protection for the delta variant.

Financial support and sponsorship

Nil.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest.

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