Spatial Allocation of Scarce COVID-19 Vaccines *†‡

  1. François M. Castonguay
  2. Julie C. Blackwood
  3. Emily Howerton
  4. Katriona Shea
  5. Charles Sims
  6. James N. Sanchirico

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Abstract

The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) is an initiative led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other partners that aims for an equitable access of COVID-19 vaccines. Despite a potential heterogeneous disease burden across space, countries receiving allotments of vaccines via COVAX may want to follow WHO’s allocation rule and distribute vaccines to their jurisdictions based on the jurisdictions’ relative population size. Utilizing economic–epidemiological modeling, we benchmark the performance of this ad hoc allocation rule by comparing it to the rule that minimizes the economic damages and expenditures over time, including a penalty cost representing the social costs of deviating from the ad hoc allocation. Under different levels of vaccine scarcity and different demographic characteristics, we consider scenarios where length of immunity and compliance to travel restrictions vary, and consider the robustness of the rules when assumptions regarding these factors are incorrect. The benefits from deviating are especially high when immunity is permanent, when there is compliance to travel restrictions, when the supply of vaccine is low, and when there is heterogeneity in demographic characteristics. Interestingly, a lack of compliance to travel restrictions pushes the optimal allocations of vaccine towards the ad hoc and improves the relative robustness of the ad hoc rule, as the mixing of the populations reduces the spatial heterogeneity in disease burden.

JEL Classification

C61, H12, H84, I18, Q54

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  1. Version published to 10.1101/2020.12.18.20248439v5 on medRxiv
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.12.18.20248439v4 on medRxiv
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.18.20248439: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

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    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

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    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2020.12.18.20248439v3 on medRxiv
  5. Version published to 10.1101/2020.12.18.20248439v2 on medRxiv
  6. Version published to 10.1101/2020.12.18.20248439v1 on medRxiv