The Economic and Societal Cost of Disinformation and Not Implementing Optimal Strategies.
Dr. Richard Bruns, PhD discusses cost-benefit analysis of public health initiatives. This analysis can be applied to the cost of implementing, discouraging, and not implementing preventative strategies. The calculation relies on the determination of the number of lives saved along with the cost of saving each life, and if the amount of resources allocated would cost more lives than lives saved. In the United States, the breakeven point for strategies is spending 10 million dollars per life saved, or $500,000 per life year saved. The effects of misinformation and disinformation have discouraged many from becoming vaccinated. When assigning dollar values to the lives lost and health harms of not getting vaccinated, misinformation has a monetized cost of between 50 to 300 million dollars every day, almost all of which is due to the health harms. There is a clear and large benefit to implementing preventative public health strategies. It does not make economic sense to discontinue preprocedural testing for COVID-19 or to drop masking requirements. It is amazing how facilities will not pay for high quality personal protective equipment (PPE). The cost in disability, lives and in healthcare disruption more than justifies expenditures for these strategies.
 
Health Watch USA^sm meeting: Aug. 16, 2023. https://youtu.be/qJItlfQsO8k