Nair Gautam, Peyton Kyle
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC 3002, Australia.
PNAS Nexus. 2022 Aug 16;1(4):pgac123. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac123. eCollection 2022 Sep.
Containing the COVID-19 pandemic will confer global benefits that greatly exceed the costs but effective solutions require the redistribution of vaccines, technology, and other scarce resources from high-income to low-income countries. The United States has played a central role in coordinating responses to previous global health challenges, and its policy choices in the current pandemic will have a far-reaching impact on the rest of the world. Yet little is known about domestic support for international recovery efforts. We use a series of conjoint and persuasive messaging experiments, fielded on two national surveys of the US adult population ( = 5,965), to study mass support for international redistribution. We find clear evidence that the general population strongly supports allocating vaccines to own-country recipients before others. But despite this "vaccine nationalism," Americans are also willing to support the US government playing a major role in global pandemic recovery efforts, provided policymakers forge international agreements that ensure moderate domestic costs, burden-sharing with other countries, and priority for certain types of resources, such as domestically manufactured vaccines and patent buyouts. Finally, we test five different persuasive messaging strategies and find that emphasizing the relatively low costs and large economic benefits of global vaccination is the most promising means of increasing domestic support for international redistribution. Overall, our results demonstrate that policymakers can secure broad public support for costly international cooperation by crafting responses aligned with the economic interests of the United States.
遏制新冠疫情将带来远超成本的全球益处，但有效的解决方案需要将疫苗、技术及其他稀缺资源从高收入国家重新分配至低收入国家。美国在协调应对以往全球卫生挑战方面发挥了核心作用，其在当前疫情中的政策选择将对世界其他地区产生深远影响。然而，对于国内对国际复苏努力的支持情况却知之甚少。我们在美国成年人口的两项全国性调查（样本量(n = 5965)）中进行了一系列联合及有说服力的信息实验，以研究民众对国际资源再分配的支持情况。我们发现明确证据表明，普通民众强烈支持先将疫苗分配给本国受助者而非其他国家。但尽管存在这种“疫苗民族主义”，美国人也愿意支持美国政府在全球疫情复苏努力中发挥主要作用，前提是政策制定者达成国际协议，确保国内成本适度、与其他国家分担负担，并优先分配某些类型的资源，如国产疫苗和专利买断。最后，我们测试了五种不同的有说服力的信息策略，发现强调全球疫苗接种成本相对较低且经济效益巨大是增加国内对国际再分配支持的最有效手段。总体而言，我们的结果表明，政策制定者可以通过制定符合美国经济利益的应对措施，获得公众对代价高昂的国际合作的广泛支持。
