Calculating the Costs and Benefits of Advance Preparations for Future Pandemics / Rachel Glennerster, Christopher M. Snyder, Brandon Joel Tan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Glennerster, Rachel.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Snyder, Christopher M.

Tan, Brandon Joel.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w30565.

NBER working paper series no. w30565

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

While Covid-19 vaccines were developed and deployed with unprecedented speed, their widespread introduction could have been accelerated--saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars--had more vaccine capacity been available prior to the pandemic. Combining estimates of the frequency and intensity of pandemics with estimates of mortality, economic-output, and human-capital losses from pandemics of varying severities, we calculate that the present value of global social losses from the stream of future pandemics can be expected to be nearly $18 trillion--over $700 billion each year going forward. According to our model, a program spending $60 billion up front to expand production capacity and supply-chain inputs for vaccines and $5 billion annually thereafter would be sufficient to ensure production capacity to vaccinate 70% of the global population against a new virus within six months. The program would generate an expected net present value (NPV) gain of more than $500 billion over the status quo of delaying investment until a pandemic arrives. A program undertaken by the United States alone would generate an expected NPV gain of over $60 billion.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2022.