Healing with Friends? Twin Survey Experiments on Vaccines and Geopolitics in Front of Global Pandemics.

While the Covid-19 pandemic took the world by surprise and affected every country on the planet, the global response was marked by clear geopolitical fractures. While pandemics represent punctuated instances of intense and symmetric crisis, these can be compounded by long-term structural shifts which alter the global balance of power and force ‘friend or foe’ lenses onto otherwise nonpartisan issues. Such a wicked problem has plagued international public health for decades, impacting things like the rollout of the malaria and smallpox vaccines, and it reflects the inherent tensions between global problem-solving, on the one hand, and immediate national self-interest on the other. From a national standpoint this often leads to tensions between functional problem-solving and value-based cooperation choices, and with possible feedback effects on domestic governance arrangements.

To understand the extent to which this affects not only political leaders but the population at large, we conduct a pair of survey experiments in a survey fielded in early 2025 in Japan, the US, the UK, Brazil, Nigeria, Italy and Germany, collecting about 1500 observations in each country.

In the first experiment, we ask the respondents’ willingness to receive a vaccine, randomizing the country of origin from a list of potentially friendly or unfriendly countries. In the second experiment, we ask the respondents to decide whether to support or not the allocation of extra vaccines doses to third countries, drawn from a list of potentially friendly or unfriendly countries. Together, these experiments allow us to reveal how much global health cooperation is conditioned by geopolitics and the intricacies of global solidarity. We expect respondents to prefer vaccines cooperation with friendly countries on average, but with significant heterogenous treatment effects for gender, concern with pandemics, left-right placement on the political spectrum, and the degree of supranational identity.