CHDS and other Harvard Chan researchers presented at the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) virtual congress last month, joining colleagues from around the world to speak to the theme of “Health Economics in a Time of Global Change.” CHDS core faculty Stephen Resch and postdoctoral fellow Allison Portnoy also led the second meeting of the Immunization Economics Special Interest Group, founded at the 2019 iHEA world congress in Basel, Switzerland.
Resch chaired an organized session on the costs and consequences of vaccine delivery strategies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In this session, Harvard Chan alumna Emma Clarke-Deelder discussed the potential for vaccine delivery programs to have unintended consequences by examining the extent to which Intensified Mission Indradhanush, a campaign-like effort to deliver routine vaccines to unreached children in India, had negative consequences for the delivery of other routine health services. Portnoy presented efficient data collection approaches for estimating immunization program costs, including vaccine delivery, focusing on the choice of data to be collected in costing studies and testing the performance of those choices using a simulation model.
CHDS core faculty Nicolas Menzies chaired an organized session on the economics of tuberculosis (TB) in LMICs, which brought together four studies working on different economic evaluations of TB prevention, including two by CHDS researchers. CHDS PhD student Jinyi Zhu presented an analysis of the health and economic consequences of an Isoniazid Preventive Treatment (IPT) expansion program among HIV-infected individuals in Tanzania using an individual-based TB/HIV coinfection simulation model. Portnoy discussed an application of the ‘full value of vaccines’ assessment framework using a case study on novel TB vaccines.
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