Getting the COVID-19 Vaccine to Those Who Need it Most
The Challenge
Across the world, people are eagerly awaiting the arrival of safe, effective COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccines will be the surest sustainable way of protecting health, saving lives, and getting beyond the pandemic — but there will not be enough to vaccinate everyone immediately. Health officials and decision makers will need to prioritize and must plan carefully to ensure that vaccines are distributed equitably to the groups most in need.
Our Approach
In October 2020, together with our partner Ariadne Labs, we launched the Vaccine Allocation Planner for COVID-19, a simulation tool based on criteria laid out by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine that provides state and county decision makers the localized data they need on available vaccine doses, priority populations, and vulnerable communities to plan vaccine distribution based on equitable allocation principles.
The successful development of a coronavirus vaccine is only the first step in protecting Americans against COVID-19. Vaccine distribution presents challenges in prioritization, logistics and issues of equity. To help state and county decision makers allocate vaccines equitably, we worked with Ariadne Labs, to develop and launch the Vaccine Allocation Planner for COVID-19.
Our tool provides decision makers state- and region-specific data to distribute vaccines based on population, demographics, risk, and underlying vulnerabilities. It also allows for the simulation of different distribution scenarios and estimates for high-priority populations. It draws on reliable sources like the Census, the CDC, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages to present the county-level data in an easy-to-use format.
The tool is pre-programmed with size estimates for 13 high-priority vaccination groups, as identified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)’s Framework for Equitable Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccine, state by state and county by county. Users can select any combination of the population groups for their state or county and see immediately how many vaccine doses will be needed to cover them all.
The tool also allows users to look at different criteria and plan scenarios, allocating 10% of their vaccine stocks preferentially to geographic areas whose residents are most vulnerable to COVID-19. This is in line with the NASEM guidelines, which stress the importance of considering the vulnerability of certain populations when deciding on vaccine allocation. This partial re-allocation can be done using our own COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index.
The end result is a clear overview of whom, where, and how many doses of vaccine can be distributed in communities — an actionable plan that can maximize the public health impact, while concurrently prioritizing vulnerable populations.
While the tool currently focuses on NASEM’s Framework for Equitable Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccine, it is built to be flexible, and will incorporate future guidance provided by the CDC and other entities as appropriate.