Interventions:
The rationale for the selection of the comparators was clear in that the vaccination strategy was compared against a background strategy of no vaccination, which might have reflected the current pattern of care in the authors’ setting. However, the authors did not report the details of the vaccination strategy, such as the type of vaccine and the target population.
Effectiveness/benefits:
The clinical data were derived from a literature review, the methods and conduct of which were not reported. Thus, it is not possible to judge the validity of the clinical inputs. Most of these reflected the country-specific setting, but no details were given on their sources or the methods of selection and combination of the data. The benefit measure was disease-specific and will be difficult to compare with benefit measures for other disease analyses.
Costs:
The categories of costs reflected the perspective. The unit costs and quantities of resources were presented for most items, making the economic analysis transparent. However, the sources of data were not described in detail; only the references revealed the use of official data. The price year was reported and the use of discounting was not required given the short time horizon.
Analysis and results:
The costs and benefits were not synthesised as a cost-consequences analysis was performed. The expected costs and benefits were appropriately reported. The issue of uncertainty was investigated by means of a multivariate analysis, which depicted a favourable and an unfavourable scenario. The study focused on the methodological differences between the two models that included (dynamic) or did not include (static) herd immunity, which turned out to be the key driver for the cost-effectiveness results.
Concluding remarks:
The sources were not reported in detail, but the decision modelling approaches, which were the focus of the analysis, were extensively described. The authors’ conclusions appear to be robust.
