Allocating Vaccines in a Pandemic: The Ethical Dimension

Wu, Joseph H; John, Stephen; Adashi, Eli Y.

doi:10.1016/j.amjmed.2020.06.007

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Direct and indirect benefits are accrued through vaccinations. 15 Direct protection of individuals from future infection and its negative health outcomes and indirect protection of the population through reduced transmission and risk of infection, including in those who have not been vaccinated, are the key vaccination objectives. 15 Mitigating the impact of COVID-19 could be achieved through targeted vaccination of all highrisk groups.…”

Section: The Case Against Colour-blind Vaccine Allocation Strategies: Uneven Starting Points In Bame Groupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…15 Direct protection of individuals from future infection and its negative health outcomes and indirect protection of the population through reduced transmission and risk of infection, including in those who have not been vaccinated, are the key vaccination objectives. 15 Mitigating the impact of COVID-19 could be achieved through targeted vaccination of all highrisk groups. The World Health Organization and The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine both recommend policy-makers allocate COVID-19 vaccines in a manner that prioritises ethnic minorities that are socioeconomically disadvantaged, preventing further exacerbations of existing health inequalities.…”

Section: The Case Against Colour-blind Vaccine Allocation Strategies: Uneven Starting Points In Bame Groupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…16,17 Securing the greatest benefit across the population will require allocating vaccines to those who have a higher risk of transmission, such as those living in multi-generational households, thereby increasing direct and indirect benefits of the vaccine. 15 In line with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, in preparation for influenza pandemics, vaccines should be allocated in a way that, first, minimises the impact of the pathogen on health and, second, reduces disruption to society and the economy. 18 In addition to the health and economic impacts of COVID-19 disproportionately affecting ethnic minorities, these communities contribute inordinately to the high-risk key workers who provide critical services – frontline and other – that have allowed the nation to operate as normally as possible and to maintain societal structure during the pandemic.…”

Section: Effective and Fair Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation Strategies: Targeting Ethnic Minoritiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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COVID-19 vaccine allocation: addressing the United Kingdom’s colour-blind strategy

2021

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Section: The Case Against Colour-blind Vaccine Allocation Strategies: Uneven Starting Points In Bame Groupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Case Against Colour-blind Vaccine Allocation Strategies: Uneven Starting Points In Bame Groupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Effective and Fair Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation Strategies: Targeting Ethnic Minoritiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

COVID-19 vaccine allocation: addressing the United Kingdom’s colour-blind strategy

2021

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“…The proposed model exhibits a nontrivial degree of complexity, and the identification of efficient approximated ways to solve it represents a challenging task. Yet, the proposed model represents a remarkably descriptive framework, and future work will be mainly devoted to incorporate other important perspectives for policy and decision makers, such as geographical [ 61 ], economical [ 62 ] and logistic aspects [ 63 ], social equity in the vaccine distribution [ 64 ], and skepticism of the population towards vaccines [ 65 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamical intervention planning against COVID-19-like epidemics

et al. 2022

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COVID-19 has got us to face a new situation where, for the lack of ready-to-use vaccines, it is necessary to support vaccination with complex non-pharmaceutical strategies. In this paper, we provide a novel Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming formulation for fine-grained optimal intervention planning (i.e., at the level of the single day) against newborn epidemics like COVID-19, where a modified SIR model accounting for heterogeneous population classes, social distancing and several types of vaccines (each with its efficacy and delayed effects), allows us to plan an optimal mixed strategy (both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical) that takes into account both the vaccine availability in limited batches at selected time instants and the need for second doses while keeping hospitalizations and intensive care occupancy below a threshold and requiring that new infections die out at the end of the planning horizon. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed formulation, we analyze a case study for Italy with realistic parameters.

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“…19 Public trust can only be ensured through transparent and consistently applied allocation of vaccines that are safe, effective and fair to everyone. 27…”

Section: Ethical Principles For Allocating Limited Supply Of Covod-19 Vaccinesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A review of leading COVID-19 vaccines, the quest for immune protection, and its key challenges. Part 4: Global Covid-19 vaccination campaign – supply and distribution logistical requirements and challenges.

Hartshorne¹,

Villiers²

2021

Preprint

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Rationale• Rapid manufacturing and effective distribution of sufficient quantities of vaccines is paramount to launch a successful vaccination campaign that will successfully achieve herd immunity to interrupt the pandemic crisis.• The fundamental objective driving COVID-19 vaccine deployment is to ensure that all people have fair access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines.• The purpose of Part 4 of this series is to highlight the logistical and ethical challenges of the supply and distribution chain of COVID-19 vaccines.Key points• All phases of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign merits strong consideration from an ethical and logistical perspective.• Vaccines must be authorised by regulatory authorities before use.• Governmental implementation bottlenecks are the cause of the inability to vaccinate at-risk populations rapidly.• Productivity and manufacturing of mRNA-based vaccines remain low, and ultra-cold chain requirements impose significant storage and distribution challenges.• Viral vector-based vaccines are based on proven technology and expected to yield significantly higher annual volumes.• Recombinant protein subunit vaccines can be easily scaled up, are reasonably stable and easier to manage, but development is currently running months behind schedule.• Live attenuated and whole inactivated virus vaccines require regulatory-approved biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) facilities for development and manufacturing, thus have more safety hurdles, are more complicated and slower to develop, and therefore unpredictable to manufacture.• An effective vaccination campaign requires adequate procurement of vaccines and political will.• Health care workers and elderly adults are the highest priorities for vaccination.• Exposing vaccine distribution and implementation plans to scrutiny is critical.• Allocation of limited vaccines should be prioritised and based on the ethical principles of maximising benefits, minimising harms, fair and equal access, transparency, informed consent and trust. • Public trust can only be ensured through transparent communications and consistently applied allocation of safe, effective, and fair vaccines to everyone.• Safety and public trust are critical considerations in vaccine acceptance.• Health care professionals are the most trusted source of information.Public health implications• Access to vaccines for global distribution before the end of 2021 will be a task of unprecedented proportions.• Experts recommend that governments invest in a more expansive and diversified portfolio of vaccines.• Many countries are under-resourced with vulnerable high-risk communities.• Multiple stakeholders are driving a global approach to equitable access.• Public distrust, anti-vaccine messaging, and vaccine hesitancy are a significant concern to vaccine campaign efficacy to contain the pandemic.

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Allocating Vaccines in a Pandemic: The Ethical Dimension

Cited by 9 publications

References 4 publications

COVID-19 vaccine allocation: addressing the United Kingdom’s colour-blind strategy

COVID-19 vaccine allocation: addressing the United Kingdom’s colour-blind strategy

Dynamical intervention planning against COVID-19-like epidemics

A review of leading COVID-19 vaccines, the quest for immune protection, and its key challenges. Part 4: Global Covid-19 vaccination campaign – supply and distribution logistical requirements and challenges.

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