Supply chains create global benefits from improved vaccine accessibility

Ensuring a more equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide is an effective strategy to control global pandemics and support economic recovery. We analyze the socioeconomic effects - defined as health gains, lockdown-easing effect, and supply-chain rebuilding benefit - of a set of idealized COVID-19 vaccine distribution scenarios. We find that an equitable vaccine distribution across the world would increase global economic benefits by 11.7% ($950 billion per year), compared to a scenario focusing on vaccinating the entire population within vaccine-producing countries, prioritizing in distributing vaccines to non-vaccine-producing countries. With incentives among lower-income countries, prioritizing the elderly who are at high risk of dying, together with the key front-line workforce who are at high risk of exposure is projected to be economically beneficial (e.g., 0.9%-3.4% annual GDP in India). Our results reveal how equitable distributions would cascade onto protection of vaccines to people and ways to improve vaccine equity and accessibility globally through international collaboration.

Daoping Wang, Ottar N. Bjørnstad, Tianyang Lei, Yida Sun, Jingwen Huo, Qi Hao, Zhao Zeng, Shupeng Zhu, Stéphane Hallegatte, Ruiyun Li, Dabo Guan, Nils C. Stenseth