You Want My Mom to Get a COVID Vaccine
By: Gabriel Seidman
Tags: Equity, Vaccines, Essential Worker, Frontline Worker, Covid 19

My mom is an essential worker. She works part-time as a grocery store clerk, which increases her chances of exposure to COVID. She also takes an immunosuppressive drug, which means she has an increased likelihood of medical complications if she gets infected. So, for obvious reasons, I hope that she can get a COVID vaccine as soon as they are available. I’m sure all of you hope that you and your loved ones can also get a COVID vaccine soon so that you can start to get back to normal.

Of course, manufacturing capacity for COVID vaccines will remain relatively limited in the near-term but will hopefully scale by the middle of next year. In the meantime, governments, pharmaceutical companies, and health systems will have the unenviable task of figuring out how to allocate and distribute these vaccines. In this supply-constrained world, some people will get access to the vaccine earlier than others. Under these circumstances, you actually want my mom to get a COVID vaccine.

The concept of public goods, drawn from the field of economics and applied to our current health crisis, can help explain why. Public goods are goods that are both non-excludable, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them, and non-rivalrous, meaning that one person using the good does not limit another person’s ability to use it. Street lighting represents a classic example. Anyone can benefit from the lighting provided by a lamp on a public street (it is non-excludable), and my usage of that lighting as I drive down the street does not diminish your ability to use the same lighting as you drive down the street later (it is non-rivalrous). Other classic examples of public goods include national security and publicly available information. Because public goods have benefits for the public, they are often worthwhile investments by governments.

Vaccines are decidedly not a public good. A government or company can easily exclude certain people from obtaining a vaccination, and one person receiving a dose of the vaccine means that another person does not get that dose.

However, in the context of infectious disease, public health is a public good. Low levels of virus circulating through the community benefit everyone. When I benefit from low levels of viral transmission, that does not stop you from benefiting from low levels of viral circulation. Quite the opposite: we have a shared and collective interest in having low levels of virus circulating through our communities so we can all feel more confident going about our daily lives. This holds especially true in a context where the virus spreads at an exponential rate. Under these circumstances, we all benefit the most when people most likely to get infected, including essential workers, receive protection from the virus. When a nurse or a public transit worker or my mom knows for certain that they don’t have COVID, that also means that they won’t take up healthcare resources getting treated for COVID. If the vaccines reduce transmission (which is possible but not yet confirmed), that means that an essential worker who gets infected would be less likely to spread COVID to someone else.

We will all be holding our breaths for the next few months as we enter a particularly dark period of the pandemic and wait for mass distribution of a vaccine (or, more likely, a portfolio of different vaccines.) In the meantime, we should all keep in mind that every single individual’s health benefits everyone else’s. Responding to the pandemic from the perspective of health equity, where the most vulnerable receive the most protection, will actually be the quickest way to end it.