ECONSALUT

04 de setembre 2020

Vaccine allocation

Discussion Draft of the Preliminary Framework for Equitable Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccine

Guiding Principles from Allocation Frameworks Developed for the COVID-19 Pandemic:
• Ensure that allocation maximizes benefit to patients, mitigates inequities and disparities, and adheres to ethical principles.
• Promote the common good through fairness, transparency, accountability, and trustworthiness.
• Save the greatest number of lives possible—while respecting rights and fairness—to
maximize benefit to the community as a whole.
• Use the best available evidence to assess benefit to communities and address uncertainty.
• Allocate scarce resources responsibly to reduce risk while providing benefit.
• Provide clear and transparent criteria for prioritization strategies.
• Ensure that allocation policies are flexible, responsive to the concerns of the affected
population, and proportionate to the epidemiological situation and the vaccine supply relative to need.

How to proceed in practical terms? Who knows...

Hockney

03 de setembre 2020

Vaccine nationalism

The Optimal Allocation of Covid-19 Vaccines

Covid-19 vaccine prioritization is key if the initial supply of the vaccine is limited. A consensus is emerging to first prioritize populations facing a high risk of severe illness in high-exposure occupations. The challenge is assigning priorities next among high-risk populations in low-exposure occupations and those that are young and healthy but work in high-exposure occupations. We estimate occupation-based infection risks and use age-based infection fatality rates in a model to assign priorities over populations with different occupations and ages. Among others, we find that 50-year-old food-processing workers and 60-year-old financial advisors are equally prioritized. Our model suggests a vaccine distribution that emphasizes age-based mortality risk more than occupation-based exposure risk.

Today we can confirm that the probability of such proposal is low. After reading FT, WHO framework has suffered a setback.