How game theory can solve vaccine inequity
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-022-00173-w
The COVID-19 pandemic has made us think differently about public health policy, and it has emphasized the urgency for us to better recognize the different motivators of policy implementation. COVID-19 vaccines were developed at ground-breaking speeds, which have allowed many countries to combat the pandemic and return to (some) normality. However, we have seen that the pandemic is not constrained by physical national borders, and that in our increasingly connected world, policymakers have the tough job of strategizing how to best utilize the vaccine supply their country has to not only serve the best interest of their country’s population, but of the global community.
As vaccine development and production became more readily available around April 2021, it was obvious that developed countries (e.g USA, Australia, Germany) were able to implement vaccine rollout much more easily than underdeveloped countries (e.g Indonesia, India, Nigeria). And, as time went by, a lot of controversies emerged when high-income countries started to administer booster shots because they have an oversupply of doses, at a time when other low-income countries have barely started their vaccine rollout.
In the research paper, “A game theoretic approach identifies conditions that foster vaccine-rich to vaccine-poor country donation of surplus vaccines,” Lampert et al. attempted to identify the different conditions in which vaccine-rich countries would donate their surplus vaccine doses to vaccine-poor countries, rather than keeping reserves for future domestic use. Several vital pandemic parameters were examined, and their study shows that full surplus donation by vaccine-rich countries is an optimal solution to the “game” if 1) a large fraction of the global unvaccinated population will be vaccinated thanks to this donation, and if 2) stocking surplus doses is ineffective in minimizing the cost of a future outbreak.
This investigation relates to our course, specifically the topic of game theory. It highlights a real-world application of game theory in which results, or outcomes of the “game,” are not as discrete. For example, in the example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, we can demonstrate that (Confess, Confess) is a Nash equilibrium. However, the real world is often more complex, and this paper is an example of it. The examination done by Lampert et al. is important because they identify ranges in which vaccine donation is “viable and stable,” which could improve future policy implementations that will ameliorate global vaccine inequity.