Alessandro Curto, Katelijne van de Vooren, Livio Garattini
Centre for Health Economics. 'Mario Negri' Institute for Pharmacological Research, Italy

Following all our correspondence on this article, we asked the Editorial Board of the journal to make at least two corrections on the published version of the article, in order to cancel two clear mistakes that could mislead potential readers.

1. The methods in the abstract report that “for each of the nine conditions, we used available Italian secondary data to estimate the lifetime cost per case”. This is partially true since American data were used to estimate the RRP, one of the nine diseases that makes up a substantial part of the costs.
2. Authors stated in the Introduction that “in March 2008, a national HPV immunisation programme that uses the quadrivalent vaccine and targets eleven year-old girls was initiated”. This is a clear mistake since in Italy most regions posted tenders to purchase HPV vaccines, so both vaccines (Cervarix® and Gardasil®) are used, as we illustrated in a recent article [1] . Moreover, it is worth noting that the corresponding author signed with another co-author a letter addressed to our article [2], which demonstrates that these authors were fully aware of writing an incorrect statement.

Although our requests for a corrigendum were based on evidence, the journal rejected them, claiming that “our editorial board members have noted that running simulation models requires assumptions and may have limitations, but their view is that the approach described in the article are acceptable”. Now, it is clear that this answer does not deal with the two corrections we requested.

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References.
[1] L Garattini, K van de Vooren and A Curto. Pricing Human Papillomavirus Vaccines. Lessons from Italy. Pharmacoeconomics 2012; 30 (3): 213-217
[2] A Capone and G Favato. Human papillomavirus vaccination is not exclusively a matter of price. Pharmacoeconomics 2012; 30 (5): 443-445