Which foreign vaccine should the government purchase in a pandemic? Evidence from a survey experiment in the United States

Background

For many countries confronting a future pandemic, the initial vaccines available will come from abroad. Public hesitancy to receive these foreign vaccines is important, as it may create an incentive for governments to forego procuring them for public use. We investigate the influence of the vaccine's country of origin on public support for government procurement during the early stages of a pandemic and examine whether endorsements from the WHO can mitigate such biases.

Methods

In the summer of 2023, we carried out a survey experiment of 1,110 U.S. residents where we asked respondents to rate their support for vaccine purchasing policies for 20 hypothetical vaccines (13,320 evaluations). We varied the vaccine's country of origin and its endorsement status from the WHO, while also randomizing other vaccine attributes.

Results

Compared to foreign vaccines from countries Americans see favorable (e.g., Germany, the United Kingdom), those originating from less favorable countries (e.g., China, Russia), garnered lower support for government procurement. Our causal mediation analysis indicates that this country-of-origin effect is primarily driven by participants' sentiments toward the vaccine. Surprisingly, WHO endorsement does little to mitigate the effect of the vaccine's country of origin. These findings are consistent across various sample subsets and considerations of vaccine quality.

Conclusion

Our study advances previous work on vaccine country-of-origin effects by assessing its impact on policy preferences for procuring initial vaccines from overseas (as opposed to uptake intentions), identifying a mechanism by which vaccine favoritism occurs, and documenting that neither personal disease susceptibility nor vaccine quality fully mitigates country of origin effects. We conclude by discussing why the study of “vaccine diplomacy” ought to not only include interstate dynamics governing vaccine purchasing and availability but also consider vaccine-producing countries' more general reputations.