The ROI of Vaccination

To Have or Have Not-That Is the Question

The vaccine is coming. The vaccine is coming! Roll up your sleeves!

In case you’ve been living under a rock or are a 24/7 Hiver you know that the UK, US and Canada have begun vaccinating citizens against Covid 19. Some of Europe is projected to start immediately after New Years Day. China and Russia both have vaccines and are inoculating citizens as fast as they can produce it.

Hooray! Hooray! We’re safe! Let the good times roll.

Not so much. The mathematics of the next 3 months is brutal, I expect to see the highest number of infections and deaths yet. By a fairly wide margin. I believe it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Is the Vaccine Program a National Plan or a World Plan?

This isn’t about the efficacy of the vaccine or the safety of it. At all.

This is about who gets it and when. For the foreseeable future the vaccine will be administered in first world countries and only first world countries. What about the rest?

WHO (world health organization) has a plan to vaccinate 20% of the population of Africa by the end of 2021. They don’t have the money, infrastructure or personnel to do so, but they have a plan. 20% is not enough to significantly slow the spread of the virus.

Asia is almost entirely dependent on China (with Singapore and Hong Kong) to provide. I really hate to think how that distribution program is going to work. There are going to be places that are way late getting the vaccine.

Europe, at least western Europe, is pretty well set to get and distribute the vaccine. Eastern Europe is a huge question mark. Does the Russian vaccine work? Does anybody not the current President of the US trust Russia not to ‘weaponize’ it’s vaccine? To send it to friends and allies first, and maybe only? What happens in places like Ukraine and Slovakia? Way more questions than answers in Eastern Europe.

North and South America have solid (if not overly optimistic) plans to vaccinate their populations. Mexico and Argentina have agreements in place with Moderna to produce hundreds of million doses. What of places like Peru and Nicaragua and the Caribbean? Nobody knows. Brazil and Venezuela are likely far down the list due to corruption and lack of infrastructure.

The Pacific nations are another version of haves and have nots. Australia scrapped their vaccine program, but are making deals to take care of their population as is New Zealand. Nations like the Philippines and Indonesia are just stuck.

What Next?

The developed nations will vaccinate a significant fraction of their populations in 2021. Whether they can vaccinate enough of the population to halt the spread remains to be seen. The non developed nations will get sick and die at somewhere near the current rate. They will certainly have enough of the virus to test the vaccination rates in the developed world.

If you think American tourists were unpopular in the world pre Covid 19, think of the resentment that will be fostered when only those who are vaccinated can travel. That applies to all the first world nations, but Americans already have the bad reputation.

The ROI of Vaccination

If the reason for the vaccine program is to stop the spread of a deadly pandemic I would submit that the thrust of the program should be world wide rather than nation by nation. There are so many questions that haven’t been and can’t be answered (how long does the immunity offered by the vaccines last? How much time do we have?) that it seems to me that we should be producing vaccine doses like we produced war material in WWII. To halt the virus sooner rather than later.

BOGO

A popular marketing scheme here in the US. Buy One Get One (free). It works for shoes and underwear and pants, why not for a vaccine. For every dose administered in the first world one should be administered in the third world. In this case it would amount to pay for two, get one.

It would go a LONG way towards neutralizing the spread of the virus, and that IS the ROI of vaccination. Get it done, soonest.

All words and photographs in this post are mine. For better or worse. The photographs in this case have nothing to do with this post, are only used to break up a mountain of text and provide some attractiveness to an otherwise bleak publication.

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