Antivax and inequality

We build a Susceptible-Infected-Vaccinated Economic growth model to measure and study the evolution of inequality in an economy with two groups of workers, who are differently exposed to an epidemic. In the context of the recent COVID-19 pandemic and using data on the United Kingdom and Canada, we describe how exposure to COVID-19 varies dramatically across occupational groups. Our regressions on 14 European countries show that the vaccination rate, the COVID-19 death rate and the number of hospitalisations do explain GDP per capita. Using our theoretical model, we prove that the economy can lead in the long run to various scenarios, which range from the disease-free economy to a scenario in which only the most exposed group suffers from the virus. We complete our theoretical analysis with some numerical exercises which show that long-run inequality increases with the share of vaccination, and it decreases with the exposure rate of the most exposed group since the economy becomes poorer.