Previously submitted to: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (no longer under consideration since Mar 30, 2021)
Date Submitted: Jan 5, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Vaccines for All: Challenges and Potential Solutions for Equitable COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution
ABSTRACT
As several COVID-19 vaccine candidates are being approved for human use, governments around the world are preparing comprehensive frameworks and protocols to address potential obstacles for equitable distribution. In this paper, we identify challenges for vaccine distribution in four core areas - supply chain logistics, monitoring of health outcomes, recipient engagement, and public health communication. Inequitable vaccine allocation, variation in vaccine efficacy and the duration of immunity, barriers to multi-dose adherence, and widespread misinformation are among the most critical issues that must be addressed. While many of these challenges have been previously identified and planned for, some have not been thoroughly addressed to target the needs of diverse population groups for which significant health disparities have been identified. To address these challenges, governments and private sector corporations have partnered to develop public health policies, vaccine administration frameworks, and technological solutions. In this paper we describe both traditional and modernized solutions to challenges in vaccine distribution and compare the merits of each approach. We firmly believe that privacy-oriented, interoperable digital solutions can help ensure the equitable distribution of vaccines for all.
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