Business Case Studies & Business Publications

COVID-19 and the Vaccine Decision

Zorc, Saša;Parmar,...

Case

COVID-19 and the Vaccine Decision

Zorc, Saša; Parmar, Bidhan L.; Mead, Jenny

QA-0922 | Published July 20, 2026 | 6 Pages Case

Collection: Darden School of Business

Product Details

In this case, students take on the role of the CFO of a health system in a fictional island country. It’s early 2021—nearly one year into the COVID-19 pandemic—and two vaccines have just been approved. The government has given the health system autonomy to decide how to distribute the limited supply among 5.5 million people. Working from an epidemiological model and detailed cost data, students must propose a vaccine-distribution schedule that minimizes total costs to the system. The CFO is also expected to defend the schedule to a public that cares about more than cost—and against a political and ethical landscape in which any prioritization choice will be contested. The case is unusual in that students’ analytical recommendation, which is straightforward to derive from the model if they can define a clean objective, sits in deep tension with students’ moral intuitions about whose lives the schedule implicitly values. That tension is the pedagogical heart of the case. This case has been used as part of the core curriculum in the Darden MBA program. Faculty from both the ethics and data analytics and decision sciences areas collaborated in teaching the case. It can be used in two distinct course settings. In a business-ethics course, the case serves to connect ethical concepts to quantitative analysis, illustrating that the choice of objective and constraints in a model is itself a moral choice. In a data-analysis or optimization course, the case can be used to teach optimization with Excel’s Solver tool in an unusually high-stakes setting. The model has enough structure to reward careful analysis but enough texture to keep the discussion from becoming purely mechanical, and the normative friction in the recommendation is hard for students to ignore.

- Build technical fluency with optimization in Excel—Solver, decision tables, and simulation-based search—applied to a multiperiod, multigroup epidemiological cost model. - Surface the assumptions and limitations underlying any quantitative model and develop students’ habit of asking what a model leaves out. - Show how ethical values shape, often invisibly, the framing of a quantitative analysis—including the choice of objective function, the categories used to partition the population, and the constraints applied. - Build a vocabulary for integrating ethical reasoning with quantitative recommendations so that students can advise senior decision-makers without collapsing the decision into either pure optimization or pure intuition. - Explore some technical issues with complicated optimization models that must resort to evolutionary techniques due to their nonlinearity: the possibility of getting local optima instead of global ones, the stochasticity of the results, and the dependence of results on the starting inputs.