The global COVID-19 vaccination campaign is the largest public health campaign in history, with over 2 billion people fully vaccinated within the first 8 months. Nevertheless, the impact of this campaign on all-cause mortality is not well understood. Leveraging the staggered rollout of vaccines, we find that the vaccination campaign across 141 countries averted 2.4 million excess deaths, valued at $6.5 trillion. We also find that an equitable counterfactual distribution of vaccines, with vaccination in each country proportional to its population, would have saved roughly 670,000 more lives. However, this distribution approach would have reduced the total value of averted deaths by $1.8 trillion due to redistribution of vaccines from high-income to low-income countries.
The full study can be viewed at National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Agrawa, V., Sood, N., & Whaley, C. M. (n.d.). The Impact of the Global COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign on All-Cause Mortality. National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2023. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31812
