Brief Description of Research
An effective vaccine will help end the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccine are very promising. While enormous research effort and resources have been put into vaccine development, there is currently no evidence-based framework for the allocation of a vaccine to both maximise outcomes and ensure an equitable distribution. Current trials indicate that a vaccine offering protection against COVID-19 is immanent and will receive regulatory approval very soon. Governments will have to make immediate decisions on how to allocate available supplies. In many countries, these will not be sufficient for universal vaccination, and so choices will need to be made as to which groups are prioritised to receive a vaccine.
It will be essential both ethically and politically that the vaccine allocation receives public input on which different types of needs should be prioritised (e.g. essential workers versus those at highest risk of dying of COVID-19). The CANDOUR project is conducting national representative surveys in twelve countries in anticipation of trial results being finalized in the coming months. It will be used to help develop a fair and efficient allocation mechanism to facilitate vaccine prioritization.
The team of scholars participating in this global project, and described in the Team tab, have stellar international reputations for the design and implementation of studies concerning public health attitudes and behaviour. They also have been on the forefront of theoretical modelling and econometric estimation methods that will be essential for the success of this project.
The CANDOUR study was supported by a National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at the University of Oxford (grant number NIHR-BRC-1215-20008) and a grant from EuroQol Research Foundation.
The Project Team
The Principal Investigator on The Oxford COVID-19 Vaccine Policy project is Professor Philip Clarke. The current team of scholars collaborating on the project include the following:
Professor Philip Clarke
Director
Health Economics Research Centre
Nuffield Department of Population Health
Professor Philip Clarke is Director of the Health Economics Research Centre (HERC) at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
His research interests include developing methods to value the benefits of improving access to health care including a Covid-19 vaccine, health inequalities and the use of simulation models in health economic evaluation.
Mariana Blanco
Facultad de Economia
Universidad del Rosario
Bogota
Mariana Blanco holds a PhD in Economics from Royal Holloway College, University of London. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Economics at Universidad del Rosario, Colombia where she set up the first Experimental Economics Lab in Bogotá, which is today known as REBEL (Rosario Experimental and Behavioral Economics Lab).
Mariana is an experimental economist working in many areas, such as labor economics, education economics, development, political economy among others. She is mainly recognized for her contributions on social preferences and belief formation. Her papers have been published in journals like Journal of Economic Theory, Experimental Economics, Games and Economic Behaviour, Management Science, among others.
Jean-Francois Bonnefon
Toulouse School of Economics
Toulouse
Professor Philip Clarke is Director of the Health Economics Research Centre (HERC) at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His research interests include developing methods to value the benefits of improving access to health care including a Covid-19 vaccine, health inequalities and the use of simulation models in health economic evaluation.
Julia Seither
Facultad de Economia
Universidad del Rosario
Bogota
Julia Seither is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Universidad del Rosario and is co-directing JILAEE – the Joint Initiative for Latin American Experimental Economics. She is also an external member of NOVAFRICA. She earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the Nova School of Business and Economics in 2019 and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago and the Universidad del CEMA. From 2017 until 2019 she was a Visiting Student Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her research is on development and behavioral economics. Most recently, she has been studying behavioral constraints of micro-entrepreneurs and their consequences for productivity, how political attitudes spread through different types of migrant networks, and the effect of feedback policies on student behavior. She has run and designed field and lab experiments in Mozambique, Uganda, and Portugal. In Mozambique, she has also managed field experiments on the role of mobile money for migrants. Currently, she is working on a field experiment in Uganda evaluating the impact of economic empowerment for female entrepreneurs and their children, and early-childhood interventions in Latin America.
Ray Duch
Nuffield College
University of Oxford
Ray is an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and the Director of the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS), which has collaboration partners in Chile, India and China. He received his BA (Honours) from the University of Manitoba in Canada and his MA and PhD from the University of Rochester.
Over the past 10 years, Ray’s research has focused on experimental approaches to social science and how these experimental methods can answer important policy-relevant questions – his recent experimental published works on experimental methodology (JEBO, APSR), policy responsibility attribution (AJPS), immigration (BJPS, POQ and SSQ), and cheating (PA) reflect this contribution to experimental social science. He is also a founder of the Nuffield College Centre for Experimental Social Sciences that he has directed for the past decade and where he has taught experimental methods to thousands of students. In 2015 Ray was invited to become an academic member of the Cross-Government Trial Advice Panel and in this role, he has provided support to numerous U.K. Government Departments in the design, implementation and analysis activities of random control trials. These RCTs are part of the U.K. Government’s effort to incorporate evidence-based assessments for policy implementations and proposals. In a very similar capacity Ray has worked with a variety of other government agencies either advising on design or providing civil servant training – included here UK DWP, UK Financial Conduct Authority, UK FSCS, Chile Ministry of Education, the Chile Audit Ministry, Contraloria, the Chile Pension Authority, and the Chile Police Department.
Jorge Friedman
Dean
Faculty of Administration and Economics
University of Santiago Chile
Professor Philip Clarke is Director of the Health Economics Research Centre (HERC) at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His research interests include developing methods to value the benefits of improving access to health care including a Covid-19 vaccine, health inequalities and the use of simulation models in health economic evaluation.
Juan Vargas
Facultad de Economia
Universidad del Rosario
Bogota
Juan Vargas is Professor of Economics at Universidad del Rosario, Colombia, where he was named Distinguished Professor in 2014. He holds a PhD in Economics from Royal Holloway, University of London (2007) and has held visiting academic positions at NYU, Harvard University, UCLA, the Institute of Development Studies, the IADB and the University of Bergamo. From 2015 to 2018 he was affiliated to CAF-Development Bank of Latin America as a research economist.
His main interests are in the areas of political economy and development, focusing particularly on the causes and consequences of violent armed conflict, the economics of crime and the interplay between political and economic, formal and informal institutions in the process of state-building. Juan’s research has appeared in peer reviewed journals such as The Review of Economic Studies, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, The Economic Journal, and Management Science among others. Juan is the network director of LACEA’s America Latina Crime and Policy Network (AL CAPONE). He obtained the 2018 Juan Luis Londoño Prize, awarded every two years to the Colombian economist under 40, as judged both his/her academic contributions and their impact in improving the well-being of Colombians.
Peter Loewen
Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
University of Toronto
Peter John Loewen is the Director of PEARL. He is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the Associate Director for Global Engagement with the Munk School, a Principal with the Media Ecosystem Observatory, and a Research Lead at the Schwartz-Reisman Institute.
Alessia Melegaro
University of Bocconi
Milan
Professor Philip Clarke is Director of the Health Economics Research Centre (HERC) at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His research interests include developing methods to value the benefits of improving access to health care including a Covid-19 vaccine, health inequalities and the use of simulation models in health economic evaluation.
Pavan Mamidi
Dean
Center for Social and Behavioral Change
New Delhi, Delhi, India
Professor Philip Clarke is Director of the Health Economics Research Centre (HERC) at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His research interests include developing methods to value the benefits of improving access to health care including a Covid-19 vaccine, health inequalities and the use of simulation models in health economic evaluation.
Laurence Roope
Nuffield Department of Population Health
University of Oxford
Dr Laurence Roope is a Senior Researcher at the Health Economics Research Centre, part of the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford. His research interests lie broadly within development economics and health economics. He has particular expertise in the economics of poverty and inequality, and in applying economic principles to tackle global challenges such as antimicrobial resistance and COVID-19.
His academic work has been published in a wide variety of academic journals, including the prestigious journal Science. His work on global inequality has been featured in United Nations Human Development Reports and by the World Economic Forum. Laurence has worked as a consultant for the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), and is an External Associate at the Global Development Institute (GDI, University of Manchester).
Mara Violato
Nuffield Department of Population Health
University of Oxford
Mara Violato, BSc, MSc, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Health Economics Research Centre, Nuffield Department of Population Health, in the University of Oxford.
Her research interests include: investigations of the socioeconomic determinants of (child) health inequalities; quality of life in children/young people and adults; applied health econometrics; the economics of gastrointestinal infections and coeliac disease; economic evaluations alongside Randomised Controlled Trials in various disease areas (e.g. child anxiety/mental health, ophthalmology); economic aspects of perinatal and paediatric care; and health care utilisation and costs. She is also involved in teaching and supervision of MSc and DPhil students.
