Measuring government commitment to vaccination

Abstract

Vaccination is among the most cost-effective health interventions and has attracted ever greater levels of funding from public and private donors. However, some countries, mainly populous lower-middle income countries, are lagging behind on vaccination financing and performance. In this paper, we discuss the rationale for investing in vaccination and construct a metric to measure government commitment to vaccination that could promote accountability and better tracking of performance. While noting the limitations of available data, we find that populous middle-income countries, which stand to gain tremendously from increased vaccination uptake, perform poorly in terms of their vaccination outcomes.