Vaccination policies
Jones B., Pritchard M., Paterson A., Rojek A.
The remarkable speed of development of safe and effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccines was a success of this pandemic. In this chapter, we discuss how these vaccines were distributed across the globe. The pandemic was characterized by significant variety of vaccine public policies and a broad spectrum of stringency of policy. The reasons for these disparities include ideological differences in the role of government, the affordability of vaccines for a given country, regional variations in epidemiology, and different policy aims (e.g., suppression vs. mitigation). In addition, global vaccine inequity was an unfortunate and pervasive issue and vaccine hesitancy impacted implementation. Evaluation of vaccine policies during this pandemic provides some key lessons to inform future pandemic policy, and for vaccine roll out for diseases with more predictable epidemiology.