Generalizable multi-vaccine distribution strategy based on demographic and behavioral heterogeneity

Satyaki Roy, Pratyay Dutta, Preetam Ghosh

Abstract: Vaccines have proved to be highly effective in preventing severe outcomes in COVID-19 patients. Despite swift vaccine development, the policymakers are still struggling to meet the global challenges in the availability, cost and distribution of vaccines. With the emergence of new vaccine types and boosters to beat the newer strains of the virus, it is necessary to design effective vaccine distribution strategies. In this paper, we present generalizable, multi-vaccine distribution measures that allocate vaccines based on the socio-economic, epidemiological and demographic profiles of different zones. The proposed approach incorporates myriad features, whereby it can assign vaccines based on a subset of the chosen criteria, minimize or fix the number of assigned vaccines and balance the trade-off between cost and criteria. Through simulation experiments, we demonstrate the ability of the optimizer to capture the variable vaccine adoption rates among zones and reward lower vaccine hesitancy with reduced contagion.