Centre for Health Policy Seminar Series Phillip Clarke

On June 16^th Professor Philip Clarke (Director of the Health Economics Research Centre at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford UK, and Professor of Health Economics at the Health Economics Unit in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne) presented a seminar titled “How does the public think COVID-19 vaccines should be allocated?: Insights from the COVID-19 Vaccine Preference and Opinion Survey (CANDOUR) study”. The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines has provided a way to end the pandemic if the vaccines can be successfully rolled out globally. Different countries have adopted a broad range of roll-out strategies. It will be necessary to understand the public's views on aspects of vaccine allocation to ensure policies are perceived as fair and to maximize overall welfare. This seminar provided an overview of the CANDOUR study, a global internet-based survey involving around 16500 members of the public from 14 countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, France, India, Italy, Russia, Spain, Uganda, United Kingdom and the United States) representing roughly half the world's population. It provided an overview of key findings on pubic preferences and attitudes on a range of issues including: who should be prioritized to receive a COVID-19 vaccine; whether COVID vaccination should be made mandatory; the level of support for donating vaccines to other countries in greater need; attitudes towards the use of lotteries as a rationing mechanism. It concluded with an overview of plans for the CANDOUR study to continue collecting follow-up data to evaluate key aspects of the global roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines.