Economic factors promoting vaccine nationalism in the face of viral evolution

The increasing interconnectedness of the modern world calls for globally equitable solutions to combat pandemic challenges. However, we have seen a tendency in recent decades for high-income countries to resort to "vaccine nationalism," hoarding vaccine production to the detriment of lower-income countries. In addition, vaccine nationalism can prove detrimental to hoarding countries in the long term, as inequitable global vaccine distribution during the COVID-19 risked exacerbating the rise of harmful immune-escape variants that largely counteracted the original benefits of vaccine hoarding. Thus, vaccine hoarding may create a problem of time preference for a vaccine-producing country, where countries heavily discounting the future would opt for vaccine hoarding while countries lightly discounting the future would opt for vaccine sharing. Using a novel modeling framework integrating epidemiological, evolutionary, and economic processes, we demonstrate how high temporal discounting, low levels of outgroup prosociality, and high vaccine-distribution costs for low-income countries can promote vaccine-hoarding tendencies. We further show how these factors interact with epidemiological and evolutionary parameters to incentivize vaccine sharing in different ways: in some parameter regimes, vaccine sharing helps by reducing variant infections, while in others, vaccine sharing helps by reducing the probability of initial variant emergence. As a result, the optimal fraction of vaccines a country should share in our model is a bimodal function of the pathogen's transmissibility. We thus provide a nuanced, model-based exploration of how various factors may contribute to vaccine nationalism's emergence, emphasizing the need for international organizations to coordinate global vaccination responses to future pandemics.