Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the (a) forecast reduction in cases of and deaths from infection by Group B meningococcal disease as a result of the introduction of the meningitis B vaccine in 2015, (b) forecast number of meningitis B vaccines to be administered and (c) cost of delivering that programme in each of the next three years.

Cost-effectiveness analysis models estimate that with the current MenB schedule of two, four and 12 months and the best available evidence we have for the new vaccine, an average of 325 cases, 66 severe cases and six deaths per year[1] will be averted.

The MenB vaccine (Bexsero^®) was added to the childhood immunisation programme as part of the routine schedule in England from 1 September 2015

Table 1: Estimated number of MenB doses offered to children as calculated from the birth cohort for each of the first three years (approximately 665,000 children).

*In the first year of the programme all children would be offered two doses (max. 1,330,000 doses), in the second and third years an additional booster dose would be offered at 12 months (max. 1,995,000 doses). The number of doses administered in each of the three years will depend on uptake, i.e. the proportion of eligible children who receive the vaccine. Although this cannot be predicted, childhood vaccines with similar schedules, such as pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV), achieve uptake over 90% both for the priming and booster doses.

Table 2: The estimated costs of delivering the MenB programme in each of the next three years.

Note: These are the full programme costs (including the cost of the vaccine) for England, inclusive of VAT.

[1] Christensen H, Trotter CL, Hickman M, Edmunds WJ. Re-evaluating cost effectiveness of universal meningitis vaccination (Bexsero) in England: modelling study. BMJ. 2014 Oct 9;349:g5725. doi: 10.1136/bmj.g5725. PubMed PMID: 25301037; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4192138