Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of InCompass. Go to InCompass-Hevon-Europe.com for free access to

all our podcasts to date. This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Christian von Stalk.

Christian Valdstalk is the executive vice president of Rand Europe.

And in the interest of full disclosure, I'd like to point out that I am a member of Rand Europe's

Council of Advisors.

We're going to talk about something called vaccine nationalism, Chris.

You've co-authored, along with some of your colleagues around Europe, quite a major study

called COVID-19 and the

cost of vaccine nationalism. So could you just briefly start by giving me what is your

working definition of vaccine nationalism? Well, Paul, great to be with you. Vaccine nationalism

is really, I guess, the state whereby you would immunize your own population first,

or prioritized the immunization of your own population, before you would share a vaccine with other countries.

Another way to think about it is also equitable distribution of vaccines.

So the idea being that those countries that can produce vaccines will

prioritize a vaccination of their own populations before they share this vaccine more widely.

Okay, so what inspired you and your colleagues around Europe to write the report and do this

research in the first place?

Well, it was interesting.

I mean, when we started thinking about this problem was, of course, earlier this year, when

we saw some countries making moves to actually prioritize the purchasing of the vaccine for

their own countries and our own populations first.

Now, you would argue that this would be normal, that countries would act out of self-interest.

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