How to counter vaccine hesitancy?
Joshua Gans in this paper develops an interesting model with endogenous vaccine adoption driven by the prevalence of the virus. Gans is using a behavioral epidemiological model where individuals can take costly social distancing actions to manage their own infection risk if they remain unvaccinated. At the same time as prevalence decreases the incentives to get vaccinated disappear. As a result his findings include:
- Policy interventions that directly target costs associated with vaccine adoption may counter vaccine hesitancy;
- But interventions such as green passports are ineffective at improving vaccination rates and may actually reduce them as the restrictions imposed by passports reduce prevalence. This implies that vaccine passports actually function as a signal which assures others that someone has a lower risk of being infectious, but they are unlikely to be useful as a punitive tool to counter vaccine hesitancy.
Vaccine Hesitancy, Passports and the Demand for Vaccination
Author: Joshua S. Gans
From: University of Toronto
Rates of vaccination and international trade
In this paper Çakmaklı et al. estimate the economic costs of COVID-19 that are solely due to international linkages under inequitable vaccine distribution. They develop a framework that combines an epidemiological Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model with international trade and production network. Their model implies that a country’s own pandemic not only impacts its own production and employment as a pure domestic supply shock, but it also impacts the production of intermediate inputs imported by other countries. The COVID related losses are estimated using OECD’s multi-industry multi-national input-output tables for 65 countries and 35 sectors. They conclude that:
We find that AEs [Advanced Economies] may bear somewhere from 13 percent to 49 percent of the global losses arising from an inequitable distribution of vaccines in 2021. Globalization might have amplified the effects of the pandemic but it is also imperative for an equitable distribution of the vaccines because this is the only way for open economies with international linkages to have a robust recovery.

The Economic Case for Global Vaccinations: An Epidemiological Model with International Production Networks
Authors: Cem Çakmaklı, Selva Demiralp, Ṣebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Sevcan Yeşiltaş, Muhammed A. Yıldırım
From: Koç University, University of Maryland