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Evidence of Low Willingness to Pay for COVID-19 Vaccines
This article draws on a recent survey conducted in peri-urban Bhopal to provide an estimate of the willingness to pay for the vaccines. The fi ndings indicate the need for higher subsidisation through expansion of the budgetary provisioning and integrating this with willingness to pay.
The authors would like to acknowledge the research funds received from Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai and University of Manchester to carry out the survey. The authors thank the investigators for helping in collecting the data and also the respondents for giving their time during the survey. The ethics committee of the IGIDR has approved the survey (Reference number: ETC/2021/01).
Attaining sufficient immunity against COVID-19 is, perhaps, amongst the biggest challenges confronting humanity around the globe. In addition to the horrific death toll of close to 4 million and counting (as on 2 July 2021), the pandemic has had devastating effects on the lives and livelihoods and is likely to reverse years of effort in combating global poverty (Slotman 2020). The crisis has exposed the utter inadequacies of the existing social and healthcare systems in most countries, regardless of their average per capita income, as well as the alarming health inequities, particularly in developing countries like India. António Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, noted in December 2020,
the pandemic has hit the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies hardest … damage that will stretch across years, even decades to come … These intergenerational impacts are not due to COVID-19 alone. They are the result of long-term fragilities, inequalities and injustices that have been exposed by the pandemic.1
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