After the Coronavirus Vaccine’s Discovery: Concerns Regarding a COVID-19 Vaccination’s Distribution

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After the Coronavirus Vaccine’s Discovery: Concerns Regarding a COVID-19 Vaccination’s Distribution

The fervent global quest for the development of a vaccine against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) begs the frightening questions: who will go first in receiving it? and will everyone get to receive it at all? This working paper seeks to highlight the risk that mercantilist market-logic approaches to hoard or overprice a future vaccine poses for human lives, and how it might reproduce global inequalities in a fatal manner. It draws upon the literature on socioeconomic disparities in vaccination to argue that the infrastructure for international dissemination of the vaccine must be built in advance and in a manner that forsakes the hostile mercantilism that has accompanied a shifting and combative international order.

Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3608750 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3608750

Suggested Citation:

Chohan, Usman W., After the Coronavirus Vaccine’s Discovery: Concerns Regarding a COVID-19 Vaccination’s Distribution (May 23, 2020). CASS Working Papers on Economics and National Affairs, EC021UC, 2020. 

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Dr Usman W. Chohan

Dr. Usman W. Chohan is an international economist and academic who was one of the founding Directors of CASS, now serving as Advisor to President CASS on Economic Affairs & National Development. He is among the Top 100 Authors across all subjects & disciplines (out of 1.2 million authors) on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), which is the largest open repository of knowledge in the world. At CASS, he has authored six books in the past five years: (1) Public Value & Budgeting: International Perspectives, (2) Reimagining Public Managers: Delivering Public Value, (3) Public Value and the Digital Economy, (4) Pandemics and Public Value Management, (5) Activist Retail Investors and the Future of Financial Markets (co-edited), and (6) Public Value and the Post-Pandemic Society, all published with Routledge. In the academic realm, his research has been cited widely, and Dr. Chohan has testified before various authorities based on his technical expertise. Dr. Chohan has a PhD in economics from UNSW Australia, where his doctoral work led to the world’s first multidisciplinary synthesis of independent legislative fiscal institutions, and an MBA from McGill University (Canada), with coursework at MIT-Tsinghua. His previous practitioner experience includes working at the National Bank of Canada and the World Bank. He is also the President of the International Association of Hyperpolyglots (HYPIA), the leading organization worldwide for hyperpolyglotism and whose membership consists of the speakers of six or more languages. He appears frequently on domestic and international television, podcasts, and lecture series in various languages. He is also trained in South Asian musicology and plays the sitar. In addition, Dr. Chohan has maintained an annual reading challenge of 100 books every year since 2011. Dr. Chohan’s forthcoming seventh and eighth books are titled Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): Multidisciplinary Perspectives (edited), and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Innovation and Vulnerability in the Digital Economy (co-edited).