We don't save money when vaccine rates drop due to the difficulty and cost to get one and leads to more cases, including more hospitalizations, complications and deaths - all of which are outcomes many times more costly to the public than any "vaccine waste" costs. Making vaccine access easy to the broad population is the core part of preventative medicine which is torpedoed by this approach.
Smith's position is that these higher actual costs - a sicker population, more citizens dead and spending more money in the long-run for far more expensive medical interventions that could have been prevented - are worth it, because they are easier to hide in a complex medical system and she can seem anti-vaccine to the people who matter to her.
With a mostly UCP-aligned media system, it'll be pretty easy to push to a low-information public next year that the higher-than-expected hospitalization costs and more preventable deaths is really an example of AHS' "mis-management" instead of government direction to not prevent disease. Yet more evidence to push to reform/privatize the system more.
An ounce of ideology is worth far more than a pound of prevention or a tonne of a cure, to distort the expression a bit to fit this government's approach.
The number of vaccines wasted last was given to be $40 or $50M, so about half of the cost of that shady sole-sourced Tylenol scam for her buddy which cost some $80M.
Note the waste she's referencing is from 2024, a year where AHS was all by banned from advertising or promoting the vaccine program in any way.