Pricing strategies for combination pediatric vaccines based on the lowest overall cost formulary

Abstract

This paper analyzes pricing strategies for US pediatric combination vaccines by comparing the lowest overall cost formularies (i.e., formularies that have the lowest overall cost). Three pharmaceutical companies compete pairwise over the sale of monovalent and combination vaccines. Particular emphasis is placed on examining the price of Sanofi Pasteur’s DTaP-IPV/HIb under different conditions. The main contribution of the paper is to provide the lowest overall cost formularies for different prices of DTaP-IPV/HIb and other Sanofi Pasteur vaccines. The resulting analysis shows that DTaP-IPV/HIb could have been more competitively priced compared with the combination vaccine DTaP-HepB-IPV, for federal contract prices in 2009, 2010 and 2011. This study also proposes the lowest overall cost formularies when shortages of monovalent vaccines occur.

Keywords::

• combination vaccines
• DTaP-HepB-IPV
• DTaP-IPV/Hib
• immunization
• lowest overall cost formulary
• US pediatric vaccine market
• vaccine shortage

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Lance E Rodewald, Director, Immunization Services Division, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CDC (GA, USA), and Janet A Jokela, Head, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (IL, USA), for their longstanding encouragement and feedback on this line of research.

Disclaimer

Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, or the United States Government.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

This research has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation (CMMI-1161458). SH Jacobson was also supported in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-10-1-0387). This material is based upon work supported in part by (while serving at) the National Science Foundation. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.