Vaccine Stockpile Sharing For Selfish Objectives
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
The COVAX program aims to provide global equitable access to life-saving vaccines. However, vaccine protectionism by wealthy nations has limited progress towards vaccine sharing goals. For example, as of April 2022 only ∼ 20% of the population in Africa has received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. Here we use a two-nation coupled epidemic model to evaluate optimal vaccine-sharing policies given a selfish objective: in which countries with vaccine stockpiles aim to minimize fatalities in their own populations. Despite the selfish objective, we find it is often optimal for a donor nation to share a significant fraction of its vaccine stockpile. Mechanistically, sharing a vaccine stockpile reduces the intensity of outbreaks in the recipient nation, in turn reducing travel-associated incidence in the donor nation. This effect is intensified as vaccination rates decrease and epidemic coupling increases. Despite acting selfishly, vaccine sharing by a donor nation significantly reduces transmission and fatalities in the recipient nation. Moreover, we find that there are hybrid sharing policies that have a negligible effect on fatalities in the donor nation compared to the optimal policy while significantly reducing fatalities in the recipient nation. Altogether, these findings provide a rationale for nations with extensive vaccine stockpiles to share with other nations.
Article activity feed
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2022.04.28.22274446: (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
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Defining the fatalities in country A at time t as DA(t), and the cost function as J(µ) = DA(tf), the optimization problem isWe solve this problem by a dynamic gradient-descent algorithm based on optimal control whose code, written in MATLAB, is available in https://github.com/WeitzGroup/vaccine allocation. MATLABsuggested: NoneResults from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The model used for simulating the epidemic and evaluating vaccine sharing policies comes with …
SciScore for 10.1101/2022.04.28.22274446: (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
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Defining the fatalities in country A at time t as DA(t), and the cost function as J(µ) = DA(tf), the optimization problem isWe solve this problem by a dynamic gradient-descent algorithm based on optimal control whose code, written in MATLAB, is available in https://github.com/WeitzGroup/vaccine allocation. MATLABsuggested: NoneResults from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The model used for simulating the epidemic and evaluating vaccine sharing policies comes with caveats. The effects of infections in one nation on another is modeled and simulated through the use of an epidemic coupling constant rather than through more complex travel policies (e.g., [14, 15]). In searching for optimal sharing policies, we assume that both nations have equal vaccination rates given available stockpiles and similar efficiency of isolating infected cases. In reality, wealthy nations likely can vaccinate at a higher rate and are likely to be more efficient in case tracing and isolation than poorer countries. Finally, we have assumed that immunity does not wane over the time-scale of the optimization (i.e., approximately 1 year). In reality, immunity wanes due to intrinsic changes and the emergence of new variants [16, 17, 18]. Incorporating these realistic scenarios in the model and analysis should be targets of future research. In summary, the optimization framework developed in this paper demonstrates the value of sharing of vaccines based on the selfish objective of minimizing fatalities in a donor country. Despite the selfish objectives, we find broad regimes (based on the vaccination rates and epidemic coupling constants) where sharing vaccines is both optimal for the donor country and leads to significant reductions in fatalities for both the donor and recipient countries. It is hoped that extensions of this modeling and optimization framework encourage re-...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
-
