The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to make difficult ethical choices, e.g., balancing public health and socioeconomic activity and prioritizing vaccine allocation or other scarce medical resources.
This new paper, authored by faculties from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, explores how utilitarian and prioritarian social welfare function (SWF) frameworks can help answer many policy questions regarding the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the discussion will focus on two issues: disease control and vaccine allocation.
Although they focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, the lessons learned from this discussion could be generalized to other epidemics and any intervention with health and non-health impacts.
Any organization or individual working in the field of immunization economics can submit findings, opportunities, calls to action, or other relevant work below to be shared with our community.