Calculating the Costs and Benefits of Advance Preparations for Future Pandemics /
Rachel Glennerster, Christopher M. Snyder, Brandon Joel Tan.
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- NBER working paper series no. w30565 .
- Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w30565. .
October 2022.
The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have caused over 7 million deaths and reduced economic output by over $13 trillion to date. While vaccines were developed and deployed with unprecedented speed, pre-pandemic investments could have accelerated their widespread introduction, saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars. 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 expected global losses from pandemics of over $800 billion annually. According to our model, spending $60 billion up front to expand production capacity for vaccines and supply-chain inputs and $5 billion every year thereafter would be sufficient to ensure production capacity to vaccinate 70% of the global population against a new virus within six months, generating an expected net present value (NPV) of over $400 billion. A proportionate advance-investment program undertaken by the United States alone would generate an expected NPV of $47 billion ($141 per capita).
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