Who Should Get It First? Public Preferences for Distributing a COVID-19 Vaccine1
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COVID ECONOMICS VETTED AND REAL-TIME PAPERS ISSUE 57 13 NOVEMBER 2020 WHO SHOULD BE VACCINATED FIRST? Jeroen Luyten, Sandy Tubeuf STATE GOVERNMENT AND and Roselinde Kessels COMMUNITY RESPONSES IN DO MASKS REDUCE DEATHS? THE US David M. Welsch Umut Akovali and Kamil Yilmaz SCHOOL CLOSURES: LONG-TERM GDP GROWTH IN THE FIRST HALF IMPLICATIONS OF 2020 Youngsoo Jang and Minchul Yum Michael König and Adalbert Winkler Covid Economics Vetted and Real-Time Papers Covid Economics, Vetted and Real-Time Papers, from CEPR, brings together formal investigations on the economic issues emanating from the Covid outbreak, based on explicit theory and/or empirical evidence, to improve the knowledge base. Founder: Beatrice Weder di Mauro, President of CEPR Editor: Charles Wyplosz, Graduate Institute Geneva and CEPR Contact: Submissions should be made at https://portal.cepr.org/call-papers- covid-economics. Other queries should be sent to [email protected]. 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Covid Economics Vetted and Real-Time Papers Issue 57, 13 November 2020 Contents Who should get it firs ? Public preferences for distributing a COVID-19 vaccine 1 Jeroen Luyten, Sandy Tubeuf and Roselinde Kessels Do masks reduce COVID-19 deaths? A county-level analysis using IV 20 David M. Welsch Aggregate and intergenerational implications of school closures: A quantitative assessment 46 Youngsoo Jang and Minchul Yum Polarized politics of pandemic response and the Covid-19 connectedness across the US states 94 Umut Akovali and Kamil Yilmaz Monitoring in real time: Cross-country evidence on the COVID-19 impact on GDP growth in the first half of 2020 132 Michael König and Adalbert Winkler 1 Covid Economics Issue 57, 13 November 2020 Who should get it first? Public preferences for distributing a COVID-19 vaccine1 Jeroen Luyten,2 Sandy Tubeuf3 and Roselinde Kessels4 Date submitted: 6 November 2020; Date accepted: 7 November 2020 Once a safe COVID-19 vaccine will become available, there will not be enough supply of it to vaccinate the entire population. Policy makers at national and international level are currently developing vaccine prioritization strategies. However, it is important that these strategies have sufficient levels of public support. We conducted a ranking exercise and a discrete choice experiment on a representative sample of 2,000 Belgians in order to elicit their preferences regarding how to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine across the population. We identified that three sub-groups had similarly high levels of support for access priority: the chronically ill, essential professions, and individuals likely to spread the virus the most. We identified two clusters of respondents. While both wanted to vaccinate essential professions, cluster one (N=1058) primarily wanted to target virus spreaders whereas cluster two (N=886) wanted to prioritize the chronically ill. Prioritizing those over 60 years of age was remarkably unpopular. Other strategies such as allocating the vaccine using a ‘lottery’, ‘first-come, first-served’ approach or willingness-to-pay Covid Economics 57, 13 November 2020: 1-19 received little support. Public opinion is a key variable for a successful engaged COVID-19 vaccination policy. A strategy simultaneously prioritizing medical risk groups, essential professions and spreaders seems to be most in line with societal preferences. When asked to choose, people agree to vaccinate essential professions but disagree whether to prioritise people with high-medical risk or virus spreaders. 1 This study did not fall under the Belgian law on experiments as anonymized data collected by a third party were analysed and the Social and Medical Ethics Committee (SMEC) of KU Leuven decided that no approval was needed. 2