Fairness and efficiency considerations in COVID-19 vaccine allocation strategies: A case study comparing front-line workers and 65-74 year olds in the United States.

The COVID-19 epidemic in the United States has been characterized by two stark disparities. COVID-19 burden has been unequally distributed among racial and ethnic groups and at the same time the mortality rates have been sharply higher among older age groups. These disparities have led some to suggest that inequalities could be reduced by vaccinating front-line workers before vaccinating older individuals, as older individuals in the US are disproportionately Non-Hispanic White. We compare the performance of two distribution policies, one allocating vaccines to front-line workers and another to older individuals aged 65-74-year-old. We estimate both the number of lives saved and the number of years of life saved under each of the policies, overall and in every race/ethnicity groups, in the United States and every state. We show that prioritizing COVID-19 vaccines for 65-74-year-olds saves both more lives and more years of life than allocating vaccines front-line workers in each racial/ethnic group, in the United States as a whole and in nearly every state. When evaluating fairness of vaccine allocation policies, the overall benefit to impact of each population subgroup should be considered, not only the proportion of doses that is distributed to each subgroup. Further work can identify prioritization schemes that perform better on multiple equity metrics.

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Copyright: © 2023 Rumpler et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests. Eva Rumpler has no conflicts of interest to disclose. Justin Feldman reports grants to institution from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and payments from the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene and employment by the Center for Policing Equity. Mary Bassett reports grants to institution from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Marc Lipsitch reports grants from CDC, grants from NIH, grants from UK NIHR, grants from Pfizer, personal fees from Merck, personal fees from Janssen, personal fees from Sanofi Pasteur, personal fees from Bristol Myers Squibb, personal fees from Peter Diamandis/Abundance Platinum, outside the submitted work; and unpaid advice to One Day Sooner, Pfizer, Janssen, Astra-Zeneca, COVAX (United Biomedical). This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products associated with this research to declare.