Vaccine allocation for the next pandemic
Vaccine distribution, allocation, uptake and hesitancy appear on 55 recent papers, and 18 of them, mostly in operations research, carry a supply-chain or allocation keyword. The COVID-19 roll-out produced data on who got vaccinated when, and at what cost. What did the allocation models get right, and what would they change for next time?
What prompted this
Since October 2025, 55 papers carry a vaccine, vaccination or immunization keyword (25 in economics journals, 16 in operations research, 10 in AI): "vaccine distribution" on 6, "COVID-19 vaccination" on 5, "childhood immunization" on 4, "vaccine uptake" on 4, "vaccine hesitancy" on 4, "vaccine allocation" on 3. Eighteen of the 55 also carry a supply-chain, distribution, allocation, cold-chain, logistics, inventory or optimization keyword.
Questions
- Comparing the 2021 allocation rules of different countries (by age, by occupation, by region) with their outcomes, which rules saved the most lives per dose, and did the optimization models of the time predict that?
- How much did hesitancy and no-shows, which the models ignored, change the optimal allocation?
- Would an allocation that accounts for distribution capacity in poor countries have changed global outcomes more than one that optimizes within rich countries?
Data that could help
Country-level vaccination timelines and mortality data, allocation rules by country, wastage and no-show records, and the models published in 2020–2021.
Next step
Re-run three published allocation models with the actual uptake and delivery data from 2021 and compare their recommendations with what countries did.