Global inequality in vaccine access, mortality and economy: An agent-based exploration

We develop an agent-based model to study the economic and public health impact of global vaccine inequality. Our model contains two world regions (higher-income vs. lower-income) and captures the co-evolution between economic activity, the spread and evolution of a hypothetical novel pandemic virus, and public health responses. We calibrate and estimate the model parameters empirically with data from the COVID-19 pandemic to capture the economic and social response to pandemic viruses in both regions. Our simulations suggest that vaccine inequality can drastically exacerbate inequality in mortality in the two regions. This is because the lower-income region suffers from drastically increased mortality, while the higher-income region generally only experiences a small (if any) decrease in mortality in most simulations. However, vaccine inequality harms both regions economically. This is driven by the fact that severe vaccine inequality eliminates the prospect of eradicating a mutating virus. Any trade-off between mortality in higher- and lower-income regions can be mitigated by increasing the production of vaccine doses. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the higher-income region benefits economically from paying for increased vaccine production.