The allocation and prioritization of medical prevention : the case of COVID-19 vaccination schedules

In the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, many professional associations, healthcare institutions, and governmental bodies published or updated prioritization guidelines regarding the allocation of scarce medical resources, e.g., beds or artificial ventilation in intensive care units. Later, in the second half of 2020, or WHO published a roadmap for prioritizing the uses of COVID-19 vaccines (Faden et al. 2022) and many governments published detailed prioritization schedules for the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, which were scarce goods at the turn of 2020 and 2021. Unlike guidelines on medical treatment (Hans-Jörg et al., 2021), official schedules on the distribution of medical prevention have not yet been analyzed or compared in scholarly journals. Thus, the main aim of our project was to provide the first systematic international comparison of the official prioritization schedules for vaccinations in 29 countries (EU, UK, and Israel) and to analyze the values and principles implicitly embedded in these documents. Our study was published in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences in 2022 (Wiśniowska et al. 2022). Although some scholars suggest that prioritization during the pandemic raises structurally similar dilemmas in the cases of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention (Emanuel et al. 2020), we highlight and analyze the specific nature of allocation decisions in the case of prevention.