Timing the world’s return to normality?

Before I attempt to answer the original question about the return to normality, I remind you of a quote from the White Queen in the Lewis Carroll’s children’s book, “Through the Looking Glass”:“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

At the beginning of this missive I told you that finding the wrong answer will give us the correct way to think about the problem. To contextualise the answer, you would need to believe in our six impossible things, which are the parameters[6] we flex to build our vaccine roll-out model.

1. Major vaccines are rolled out on schedule and there are no major hiccups in manufacturing (other than reasonable waste which is assumed at 10%).
2. China and Russia are net exporters of vaccines – we assume China releases 25%. In practice, this is a real wild card, as data on Chinese inoculation is quite opaque and, although China has an advantage in being able to pool manufacturing capability better than the West, implied supply is not enough. Anecdotally, we have heard of discussions with Western producers which, if there were an agreement, would make China a net consumer, reducing capacity for the rest of the world.
3. Developed markets make excess supply available when they reach 150% of their population. Currently we cannot say for sure what this number needs to be, other than meaningfully about 100%. Partly this reflects hoarding, but also, we do not know about the efficacy of each vaccine to mutant strains yet, when it may become desirable to take multiple vaccines, or when a “booster” shot becomes beneficial, if antibody response declines through time.
4. Unfortunately, while we have details on quantities purchased, we have very limited details on the priority of each country compared with others who have also pre-ordered. Where we have no better information, we create a key based on pro-rating pre-order quantity (50%), total population (25%) and population at risk (25%) to allocate supply. COVAX, as a supranational, is assumed to have an equal priority to the US.
5. Initially excess supply is not entirely absorbed by other developed markets and 50% of the sharing of excess vaccines goes to emerging markets.
6. We live in a frictionless environment, implying that there are no logistical delays and that immunity is achieved immediately. Rather than trying to account for differing national abilities to implement vaccination programs, our model simply implies when a country would have enough courses of a vaccine. Realistically, we would expect delays, and we also need to remember that most vaccines require multiple doses, to be taken weeks apart.

If you are willing to believe these impossible things, then our model would imply that for developed markets (purple lines) the vaccine roll-out is largely a domestic logistical challenge over the second and third quarters of this year, for most emerging markets we should see meaningful progress in Q3, but full vaccination would be in early-to-mid 2022. Finally, SA (teal line), looks to do meaningfully worse than most other low- and middle-income countries, as its implied total vaccination occurs around October 2022.