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 the model 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 due to the fact that higher-income regions experience small decreases in mortality in a majority of simulations, while lower-income regions suffer from drastically increased mortality. However, vaccine inequality economically damages both regions. This is driven by the fact that strong vaccine inequality evaporates all hopes to eradicate a mutating virus. Increasing the production of vaccine doses can mitigate and sometimes even erase the trade-off between mortality in higher- and lower income regions. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that higher-income countries benefit economically from paying for increased vaccine production.