Public Support for Global Vaccine Redistribution: The Role of Recipient Characteristics, Donor Country Herd Immunity and Reciprocity Frames

Access to COVID-19 vaccines is highly unequal. While rich countries in the global North are rolling out third doses, vaccination rates in many developing countries remain in the single digits. While the affluent Western democracies that produce the vaccine have pledged to provide access to Covid-19 inoculant, vaccine redistribution schemes such as COVAX lack behind expectations. In this paper, we analyze public preferences for global vaccine redistribution in one donor country, Germany. Previous literature on public support for international aid or redistribution has focused on the socio-economic characteristics and social identities of citizens in donor countries. We expand on this literature by bringing in situational and relational characteristics between donor and recipient countries. Building on the deservingness literature, which studies redistribution preferences in the context of national welfare states, we investigate how medical need, geographic proximity, level of democracy and past pandemic policies of the recipient country as well as the cost of redistribution for the donor affect public support to donate vaccine doses. In addition, we added an information treatment on the importance of a speedy global vaccination to contain the possible emergence of virus mutations. Using a factorial survey experiment conducted in May 2021, we find that perceptions of situational need and (lack of) control as well as having a democratic political system increase citizens’ willingness to donate vaccines. Geographical proximity, however, does not have a statistical significant effect. Moreover, the situation in the donor country has a large effect: If the donor country has reached herd immunity, public support for redistribution increases significantly. Furthermore, our informational experiment shows that support for aid is strengthened if policy-makers emphasize ‘epidemiological reciprocity’, i.e., the risk of new, possibly vaccine-resistant, mutations emerging in unvaccinated populations. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the conditions that enable global vaccine equity.