A Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Mechanism Approach for Fair and Equitable COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution

On the 11th of March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 disease as a global pandemic. Large-scale vaccination is considered the most promising method for limiting disease transmission, reduce deaths and end the pandemic. However, distributing COVID-19 vaccines in a timely and equitable manner is a complicated task. To solve this issue WHO, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) initiated a worldwide initiative called COVAX that aims for an equitable access for COVID-19 Vaccines. This research aims to define a new approach to manage the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine through COVAX facility and to compare it to COVAX first allocation phase. Our results show the limitations of a two-player game approach between a country and the COVAX facility. We were able to show that there are no pure nor multiple Nash equilibrium given our assumptions. Moreover, even in the case of mixed Nash equilibrium, having the country always be truthful in reporting their readiness and COVAX Faculty to always trust will not be fully achievable. Thus, the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanism was applied to solve this issue. Online public data were used to find the characteristics of the utility function by having four different countries with different death and readiness. The results illustrated that (1) VCG is indeed truthful mechanism because a country will not benefit from being untruthful by getting penalized, leading to less benefit, (2) when the deaths are greater than 1 per 100K, the COVAX facility will allocate vaccines that are equal to the country’s vaccine administration readiness. Furthermore, when compared to the official COVAX allocation mechanism, our mechanism reduces several verifying steps and therefore reduce the overall allocation process time.