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mfb- t1_iuci4cz wrote

Since 2009, only one child died from rabies in the US: CDC has a table. The US has 3.6 million children per year. Vaccinating all of them would cost billions every year and have hundreds of thousands of children with side effects, only to save a child every decade or so. You can still vaccinate someone after a possible exposure, that's generally the better approach.

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raygundan t1_iuis7j7 wrote

The link you used shows cost is for post-exposure prophylaxis, which is much more expensive than up-front vaccination.

Which is not to say there's no cost associated with vaccination, just that it's probably an order of magnitude (or two) lower than if you were giving everybody the post-exposure treatment.

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mfb- t1_iuitrqr wrote

I found a range of $500 to $1200 that's explicitly for pre-exposure vaccination. Multiply that by 3.6 million children and we get costs of 2-4 billions every year, and that's assuming we only vaccinate every child once and then skip the follow-up measurements/doses discussed in other comments.

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