Childhood vaccines don’t just save lives. They save money.

There is no way to put a price on the pain and suffering that childhood vaccines prevent. But as it turns out, there are savings to the country.

Over nearly three decades, childhood vaccines — including those against measles, tetanus and diphtheria — have saved the United States $540 billion in health care costs, according to data from the National Institutes of Health. new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Routine childhood immunizations have prevented an estimated 508 million illnesses, 32 million hospitalizations and 1,129,000 deaths, the agency estimated on Thursday.

“These vaccination programs, once you have the infrastructure in place to implement them, pay for themselves right away,” said William Padula, a health economist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the novel study.

The estimated savings include money that would be spent treating the initial infection and then treating related conditions. That figure dwarfs the cost of developing vaccines.

However, vaccine-preventable diseases can also have indirect economic impacts, for example if children become permanently disabled as a result of infection or if parents have to miss work to care for diseased children.

After taking into account these costs, the CDC raised the savings estimate to $2.7 trillion.

Dr. Padula said the numbers are comparable to savings from medical breakthroughs such as the cure for hepatitis C, or major public health bills such as the Immaculate Air Act.

Despite the significant health and economic benefits, attitudes toward childhood vaccines are changing. questionnaire released earlier this week showed that just 40 percent of Americans believe it is “extremely critical” to vaccinate their children, down from about 64 percent in 2001.

According to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of people surveyed considered vaccinations to be “extremely critical” or “very critical,” up from 94 percent in 2001.

The shift was largely driven by growing skepticism among Republicans or Republican-leaning Americans. About a third of Republican respondents said they believed the risks of vaccines were more risky than the diseases they were intended to prevent.

Concerns about vaccine safety have been growing in some communities for decades, but the coronavirus pandemic has made those concerns more widespread, said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University School of Public Health.

She added that the health care system was partly to blame for failing to build patient trust before the state of emergency. When people had concerns about COVID-19 vaccines, she said, few had a doctor they trusted to answer their questions.

People who had trusted doctors often couldn’t reach them to express their concerns. Some who thought they had experienced sedate side effects felt their concerns were ignored.

Shortly after the vaccines were approved for children, Dr. Nuzzo recalled receiving an email from her family’s pediatrician, who said the office was unable to answer questions or calls about the vaccine. She wondered: Who were they supposed to ask?

Information about vaccines from trusted organizations has often omitted safety issues and repeatedly emphasized that vaccines are protected and effective.

“I totally understood why people had questions about it,” Dr. Nuzzo said. “It was a novel vaccine. It was a novel vaccine technology. Was there was no infrastructure to facilitate them understand.”

With a lack of accessible healthcare providers, she added, many people turned to social media to find answers to their questions, which not only spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine but all vaccines.

Since the pandemic, some researchers have found that skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccine has increased transferred to attitudes towards childhood vaccinationsmany of which have been operating for decades.

Parents who did not want to get the COVID-19 vaccine were more likely to forgo vaccinating their child with the MMR vaccine, which protects against mumps, measles and rubella, according to current research by John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

In the 2022-2023 school year, nearly three-quarters of all states had MMR vaccination rates below the “target” rate of 95 percent, according to the CDC reportOnly 81 percent of students in Idaho, which has the lowest vaccination rate in the nation, received the MMR vaccine this year.

Overall, 93 percent of U.S. kindergarteners were vaccinated with all federally required vaccines this school year, up from about 95 percent before the pandemic.

Even tiny declines in vaccination rates are cause for concern, Dr. Brownstein said. There were 13 measles outbreaks in 2024, compared with four in 2023, which were largely linked to groups of unvaccinated children, according to CDC data.

Dr. Nuzzo said the decline in childhood vaccinations not only threatens to undo health gains and economic gains, but also causes greater social instability.

“It’s not just about the health benefits. It’s not just about the cost of health care,” she said. “They’ve allowed us to live lives with much less chaos than people used to.”