Decision Analysis of the COVID-19 Vaccines

Abstract

Abstract The entire globe is struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic since March 11, 2020. There is still a large number of infected patients and death, and there is no proven treatment for the infection yet. This has led to the race in vaccine development to protect people from COVID-19 infection. As of February 3, 2021, there were 289 experimental COVID -19 vaccines in development, 66 of which were in clinical trials with different phases, and 20 of them were in phase 3. This study aims to evaluate 15 important vaccines based on criteria such as the dose number, dosing schedule, storage advantages, efficacy, and side effect. In this evaluation, we use the fuzzy PROMETHEE approach, which is an important Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique. The importance level of the criteria is determined based on expert opinion. The result shows that the EpiVacCorona vaccine is the most effective vaccine to prevent COVID-19 infections based on the selected criteria and the importance level of each criterion. The result obtained may change based on individual or expert’s priorities. Due to the use of different criteria for the ranking and different weightings of the criteria, the ranking result may differ. This study also shows the strengths and weaknesses of the selected vaccines and the applicability of the MCDM technique for the evaluation of COVID -19 vaccines.