Vaccines have been one of the most effective public health interventions in modern history, leading to the near eradication of diseases such as smallpox and polio and drastically reducing morbidity and mortality from other infectious diseases. In the past two decades, innovations in vaccine development have continued to increase these gains (Supplementary Fig. 1). For example, it has been estimated that vaccination prevented 37 million deaths across 98 low- and lower-middle-income countries (LICs/LMICs) from 2000 to 2019, and that the mortality rate could have been up to 45% higher without vaccines (
Lancet 397, 398–408; 2021).
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank H. Currie, D. Burns, and Y. Chen for their support, as well as M. Conway, M. Wilson, M. Craven and J. Smith for their guidance.
Competing Interests
The authors of this article are employees of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy that works with the world’s leading biopharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The research for this specific article was funded by McKinsey’s Life Sciences practice.
