As the COVID-19 vaccine rollout continues, never before has so much of the world’s population been vaccinated against a single disease in such a short period. But there’s a lot more to do, and it’ll take global cooperation, funding and commitment to ensure that no child or adult suffers or dies from a vaccine-preventable illness in the years ahead.
Achieving this goal will require a continued focus on the science and logistics that are the foundation of vaccine rollout. One of those sciences is mRNA, whose rapid development enabled Pfizer to make a large quantity of vaccine for a relatively small investment in the COVID-19 pandemic. The other is digital technologies, which facilitated the massive scale up and speedy delivery of vaccines.
Vaccine allocation strategies have important implications for the health impact of vaccination campaigns. Our analysis finds that prioritising groups with high daily person-to-person interactions reduces total fatalities substantially (up to 40% lower) when daily vaccine rollout rates are fast and children are eligible for vaccination. Similarly, prioritising groups with higher risk of infection and high exposure can be highly effective at low vaccination rates.
We also find that vaccine deployments significantly reduce new COVID-19 infections, intensive care unit admissions and fatalities, and are more effective when accompanied by stringent containment measures or when the country is experiencing a major outbreak. However, the effectiveness of a vaccine is also sensitive to country-specific conditions such as the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak and the dominant COVID-19 variant or type of vaccine used.