The benefit of HPV vaccination

In part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination have become a hot button issue. This is true even for non-COVID vaccines that have proven significant health benefits, such as those for human papillomavirus vaccines (HPV). Although betweeen 2016 and 2021 the share of teenagers receiving their HPV vaccination series increased from 60% to 77%, Bloomberg…

Uncertainty and Vaccination Decisions

An interesting result from Courbage and Peter (2021): …uncertainty about the probability of side effects and the efficacy of the vaccine always reduces take-up under ambiguity aversion. However, uncertainty about the underlying disease, being the probability of sickness or the probability of a severe course of disease, may either encourage or discourage vaccination. Because vaccination…

“Mr. Biden is wrong”

That was the conclusion of The Economist on his decision to suspend intellectual property protections for the makers of COVID-19 vaccines. In the article “Ten million reasons to vaccinate the world“, they write: Many experts argue that, because some manufacturing capacity is going begging, millions more doses might become available if patent-owners shared their secrets,…

COVID-19 vaccination update

This weekend I received my second COVID-19 vaccine. While I certainly feel lucky to live in a country with ample vaccine supply, other countries are not so lucky. Let’s take a look at the numbers from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. These numbers are updated through May 2, 2021. First, you’ll see that…