Economic Evaluation of Varicella Vaccination Programmes: A Review of the Literature. The Authors' Reply.

The article explains that if decision makers are willing to adopt the recommended societal perspective, universal infant varicella vaccination is very desirable since large savings are expected to occur in all economic evaluations adopting this perspective. By contrast, if decision makers do not wish to consider the time lost by parents or caregivers and prefer to adopt the more narrow healthcare payer's perspective, then, the results of the studies taking such a perspective all indicate that universal infant varicella vaccination results in high net costs, whilst showing a low efficiency in saving life-years and averting deaths, in comparison with other programmes.