The frequency of viral outbreaks and pandemics in the last two decades, including the current COVID pandemic, has focussed attention on Canada’s pandemic preparedness generally and its pandemic vaccine development and production self-sufficiency, in particular. As Canada faced disruptions in...

The COVID-19 outbreak is one of the most significant public health crises in modern history, with considerable effects on the agendas of governments. Non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccination campaigns have been designed first and foremost to protect vulnerable groups. However, political...

Various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were adopted by countries worldwide to contain the transmission of COVID-19. But their implementation raises a debate on the effectiveness of these mitigation measures. Studying 13 types of NPIs with the daily data of 185 countries from January to...

This paper provides an analysis of patents covering selected antibodies and vaccines used in the treatment or prevention of COVID-19. The aim of the report is to support national patent offices and interested parties in developing countries with information that can serve as guidance for the...

We study the effect of education on vaccination against COVID-19 and influenza in Germany and Europe. Our identification strategy makes use of changes in compulsory schooling laws and allows to estimate local average treatment effects for individuals between 59 and 91 years of age. We find no...

We conduct a randomized survey experiment to compare the short- and longer-term effects of fact checking to a brief media literacy intervention. We show that the impact of fact checking is limited to the corrected fake news, whereas media literacy helps to distinguish between false and correct...