The futility of being selfish in vaccine distribution

TL;DR

This paper investigates vaccine sharing strategies between communities using the SIR model, revealing that sharing often reduces overall infections without harming the sharing community, challenging the notion of selfishness in distribution.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic message passing and optimal control framework to analyze vaccine sharing in structured communities, demonstrating benefits of sharing in various scenarios.

Findings

Sharing reduces global infection rates

Sharing benefits the community without increasing local infections

Optimal strategies depend on community connectivity and infection rates

Abstract

We study vaccine budget-sharing strategies in the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) model given a structured community network to investigate the benefit of sharing vaccine across communities. The network studied comprises two communities, one of which controls vaccine budget and may share it with the other. Different scenarios are considered regarding the connectivity between communities, infection rates and the unvaccinated fraction of the population. Properties of the SIR model facilitates the use of Dynamic Message Passing (DMP) and optimal control methods to investigate preventive and reactive budget-sharing scenarios. Our results show a large set of budget-sharing strategies in which the sharing community benefits from the reduced global infection rates with no detrimental impact on its local infection rate.