Vaccination policy

Vaccination policy refers to the health policy a government adopts in relation to vaccination. Vaccinations are voluntary in some countries and mandatory in others, as part of their public health system. Some governments pay all or part of the costs of vaccinations for vaccines in a national vaccination schedule.

Vaccination policies aim to produce immunity to preventable diseases. Besides individual protection from getting ill, some vaccination policies also aim to provide the community as a whole with herd immunity. Herd immunity refers to the idea that the pathogen will have trouble spreading when a significant part of the population has immunity against it. This protects those unable to get the vaccine due to health reasons, such as age, allergies and having received an organ transplant.

Each year, vaccination averts between two and three million deaths, across all age groups, from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and measles. These diseases used to be among the leading causes of death worldwide. Now, many of these deaths are able to be avoided.

The impact of immunization policy on vaccine-preventable diseases has been listed as one of the top public health achievements.

With some vaccines, a goal of vaccination policies is to eradicate the disease - make it disappear from Earth altogether. The World Health Organization coordinated the global effort to eradicate smallpox globally. Victory is also claimed for getting rid of endemic measles, mumps and rubella in Finland. The last naturally occurring case of smallpox occurred in Somalia in 1977. In 1988, the governing body of WHO targeted polio for eradication by the year 2000, but didn't succeed. The next eradication target would most likely be measles, which has declined since the introduction of measles vaccination in 1963.

Rational individuals will attempt to minimize the risk of illness, and will seek vaccination for themselves or their children if they perceive a high threat of disease and a low risk to vaccination. However, if a vaccination program successfully reduces the disease threat, it may reduce the perceived risk of disease enough so that an individual's optimal strategy is to encourage everyone but their family to be vaccinated, or (more generally) to refuse vaccination at coverage levels below those optimal for the community. For example, a 2003 study found that a bioterrorist attack using smallpox would result in conditions where voluntary vaccination would be unlikely to reach the optimum level for the U.S. as a whole, and a 2007 study found that severe influenza epidemics cannot be prevented by voluntary vaccination without offering certain incentives. Governments often allow exemptions to mandatory vaccinations for religious or philosophical reasons, but some believe that decreased rates of vaccination may cause loss of herd immunity, substantially increasing risks even to vaccinated individuals.

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