Vaccines and variants: A comment on “optimal age-based vaccination and economic mitigation policies for the second phase of the Covid-19 pandemic”()

This note discusses age-specific vaccination programs designed to curb the Covid-19 pandemic. We first provide some comments on the analysis by Glover et al. (2021b) and point directions where further research can be carried out. Additionally, we adapt the framework from Brotherhood et al. (2021) to assess the effects of different vaccination schemes when more infectious variants can emerge when more infections take place. We find that policy prescriptions crucially depend on taking individual behavioral responses into account and on whether variants can appear.