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Friday, March 29, 2024

WHO: 3rd pneumonia vax at parity with other vaccines

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The World Health Organization (WHO), in a recent study, declared that a third pneumococcal vaccine (PCV) developed by the Serum Institute of India is at parity with two other vaccines being offered to address child pneumonia, the number one killer disease among kids.

At present, two PCVs, both coming from global vaccine manufacturers, are being offered to address child pneumonia – Pfizer’s Prevnar or PCV 13 and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK’s) Synflorix or PCV 10.

The third PCV, Serum Institute’s Pneumosil, has been declared by a 2021 WHO study as non-inferior to both Prevnar and Synflorix.

According to UNICEF, one child dies globally every 39 seconds because of pneumonia.

The situation has been exacerbated by the global attention on COVID-19, which has somehow taken attention away from pneumonia and other top diseases that could have otherwise been prevented by vaccination.

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In the Philippines, the Pediatric Infectious Disease Society of the Philippines (PIDSP) in its December 2021 journal cited pneumonia as the third leading cause of death among children 5 years old and below, accounting for 14 percent in child mortality.

In its 2021 study on prequalifying PCVs for childhood immunization programs, the WHO said the 10-valent (PCV10) has the “same substantial impact against pneumonia, vaccine-type (VT), invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD), and nasopharyngeal (NP) carriage in a variety of settings,” when compared to the earlier prequalified 13-valent (PCV13) vaccine.

To supplement country choices for such vaccines for childhood immunization programs, the WHO recommended that the “choice of product to be used should be based on programmatic characteristics, vaccine supply, vaccine price, the local and regional prevalence of vaccine serotypes, and antimicrobial resistance patterns.”

The findings of the 2021 WHO study are aligned with an earlier study conducted by the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Council of the Department of Health (DOH) in 2020 where it reassessed both PCV10 and PCV13 in light of the need to expand the National Immunization Program (NIP) for a more universal vaccine coverage for the country.

In the HTA Unit report, the DOH found that multi-dose vial (MDV) PCV13 is at least P5 billion more expensive than single-dose vial (SDV) PCV10. The study concluded that in terms of overall program cost, “PCV10 is deemed more affordable than PCV13.”

In the case of the WHO vaccine parity study, it was shown that while PCV10 is as effective as PCV13 serotypes, the former is more affordable.

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