How to Fix the Vaccine Rollout

At a moment when vaccines promise to end the coronavirus pandemic, emerging new variants threaten to accelerate it. The astonishingly fast development of safe and effective vaccines is being stymied by the glacial pace of actual vaccinations while 3,000 Americans die each day.

Minimizing death and suffering from COVID-19 requires vaccinating the most vulnerable Americans first and fast, but the vaccine rollout has been slow and inequitable. Prioritization algorithms have led to the most privileged being prioritized over the most exposed, and strict adherence to priority pyramids has been disastrously slow. Yet without prioritization, vaccines go to those with greatest resources rather than to those at greatest risk.

Algorithmic thinking can reduce chaos and slow-downs, identify gaps between what we are doing and need to do

As a new administration takes office, there is hope that the vaccination rollout will be infused with both common sense and urgency. But to best protect lives, livelihoods, and health, we need not just speed, but also a quantitative accounting of who is at risk and how to best save them.

As a computational biologist, I study scalable distribution systems in biology,¹ and I design algorithms for distributed robot systems that are fast, flexible, and robust.^2,3 The systems we build have important lessons for building a fast and effective distribution system for vaccines.

To beat COVID-19, we don’t need algorithms but we do need algorithmic thinking to effectively scale distribution of vaccines to 300 million Americans. This requires us to i) state our goals clearly, ii) provide