To Give or Not To Give: Pandemic Vaccine Donation Policy
Abraham Holleran, Susan E. Martonosi, Michael Veatch

TL;DR
This paper uses an epidemiological model to analyze vaccine donation policies during a pandemic, revealing that donating vaccines can delay virus mutations and sometimes benefit donor countries, challenging the zero-sum view of vaccine distribution.
Contribution
It introduces a model showing that vaccine donations can delay variant emergence and benefit both donor and recipient countries, informing equitable distribution strategies.
Findings
Donating vaccines can delay the emergence of more contagious variants.
In some scenarios, donating all vaccines benefits the donor country.
Vaccine distribution is not a zero-sum game between countries.
Abstract
The global SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic highlighted the challenge of equitable vaccine distribution between high- and low-income countries. Many high-income countries were reluctant or slow to distribute extra doses of the vaccine to lower-income countries via the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) collaboration. In addition to moral objections to such vaccine nationalism, vaccine inequity during a pandemic could contribute to the evolution of new variants of the virus and possibly increase total deaths, including in the high-income countries. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, we use the epidemiological model of Holleran et al. that incorporates virus mutation. We identify realistic scenarios under which a donor country prefers to donate vaccines before distributing them locally in order to minimize local deaths during a pandemic. We demonstrate that a nondonor-first…
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Taxonomy
TopicsVaccine Coverage and Hesitancy · COVID-19 epidemiological studies · SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Research
