This is the damning fact:
Epidemiologist Michael Baker told Stuff it was difficult to properly monitor influenza and other winter illnesses, because high-quality surveillance programmes were discontinued, including the Ministry of Health not renewing its contract for the FluTracking tool for cost-saving reasons.
I wonder how much it would cost to offer the flu vaccine for free; every year?
Would it be cheaper than the loss from a bad flu? Probably.
It costs about $20 to get it from my local pharmacy. There are about five million people.
Let’s assume that the government/pharmac/healthnz/whomever could source five million doses at a good rate and fund the staffing requirements to administer them. Say that is the same $20/dose cost.
$100m or about ten metres of motorway.
The best part is you don’t need to do all five million, I think about 80% is enough for herd immunity to take effect. So it’s cheaper at $80m.
'flu takes about a week to recover from. So every person that gets it ‘costs’ their employer a week’s wages. Call that $25/hr × 40hr = $1000/wk. We’d only need to stop 80,000 people from getting 'flu each year to break even. NZ had almost half a million cases in 2025.
It seems that the math, maths quite well here.
Hospital stays are a big expense.
For context, 3 out of 5 of my family got the flu this year. One ended up in hospital for 2 nights.
Preventing 1000 hospital nights had to be worth quite a lot also.
Indeed it would, I wasn’t sure how the numbers would work out.
Just the sick day cost is what you’d need to convince your local National/Act/NZF incumbent.
Well done, team.
I wonder when a party will get their claws on the idea? (And which one!)
