No-Fault Vaccine Injury Compensation Systems Adopted Pursuant to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Response

No-fault vaccine injury compensation systems have developed over the course of the twentieth century, mostly in the richest countries in the world. Acknowledging that severe reactions to vaccines are rare, but can result in serious and sometimes complex injury, these systems provide financial and social support for those suffering these rare side effects. During the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rapid development and deployment of vaccines using novel technologies, these systems have proliferated not only among wealthy countries, where in their modern form they originated and spread, but also low- and middle-income ones. Adopting varying approaches to funding, eligibility, administration, process, and components of compensation and rights of appeal, these new systems offer protections to populations in low- and middle-income countries that until 2020 covered only those in relatively wealthy states, especially Europe and North America. The purpose of this Article is twofold. First, it provides the first comprehensive landscape analysis of no-fault vaccine injury compensation systems since before the COVID-19 pandemic. That analysis identifies twenty-five such systems, almost all of which were established for routine immunizations. Second, it provides an accessible resource for advocates and planners in low- and middle-income countries that may benefit from an analysis of administrative, funding, eligibility, and compensation alternatives that they may consult when considering whether and how to construct their own no-fault vaccine injury compensation systems

Do people reduce compliance with COVID-19 guidelines following vaccination? A longitudinal analysis of matched UK adults

INTRODUCTION: COVID-19 vaccines do not confer immediate immunity and vaccinated individuals may still be at risk of transmitting the virus. Governments have not exempted vaccinated individuals from behavioural measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19, such as practising social distancing. However, vaccinated individuals may have reduced compliance with these measures, given lower perceived risks. METHODS: We used monthly panel data from October 2020 to March 2021 in the UK COVID-19 Social Study to assess changes in compliance following vaccination. Compliance was measured with two items on compliance with guidelines in general and compliance with social distancing. We used matching to create comparable groups of individuals by month of vaccination (January, February or not vaccinated by February) and fixed effects regression to estimate changes in compliance over the study period. RESULTS: Compliance increased between October 2020 and March 2021, regardless of vaccination status or month of vaccination. There was no clear evidence that vaccinated individuals decreased compliance relative to those who were not yet vaccinated. CONCLUSION: There was little evidence that sample members vaccinated in January or February reduced compliance after receiving vaccination for COVID-19. Continued monitoring is required as younger individuals receive the vaccine, lockdown restrictions are lifted and individuals receive second doses of the vaccine

Financial Accounting Case Studies

This thesis was completed in the 2021-2022 academic year and is comprised of eleven accounting case studies. The topics from these cases vary widely and are not strictly focused on accounting. Examples of this includes cases done on the twenty-year anniversary of 9/11, the ramifications of COVID-19 on Pfizer, and having to interview a local business owner. We also completed cases concerning the city we wanted to intern in as well as an excel certification course. Following the conclusion of case 5, me and several other honors students worked together to complete the next six cases which involved analyzing International Paper. Topics we wrote on include the business structure of International Paper, audit risks facing the company and its controls, tax saving strategies, advisory opinions on the company’s operations, and an assessment of cyber-security and other large threats facing the company. Even though no one in the group had taken either tax or audit, these cases allowed us to have our first exposure to these topics. After completing these cases, we put together the papers into a PowerPoint presentation which was then presented in front of several accounting professionals from different firms. When our class was not working on a case, we had several speakers from different accounting firms speak to us. These interactions allowed us to get a head start on recruiting as well as make meaningful connections

Diverse Analyses of Accounting: A Series of Case Studies

This thesis consists of a diverse variety of case studies surrounded accounting and accounting-related issues. The first five cases span a broad range of topics, such as 9/11 and COVID-19 and their effects on the accounting industry. The last five cases, which were completed as a team, provide an in-depth analysis of Goldman Sachs, mostly through the team’s study of their 2020 and 2021 financial statements. These cases provide an overview of the company and the team’s suggested improvements in each line of service—audit, tax, advisory, and risk advisory. Through these cases, I was provided a much deeper insight into accounting in the real world and how this industry spans much further than I originally thought. Through hands-on involvement with company’s annual financial statements, personal interactions with successful businesspeople, and much online research, this thesis has only deepened my passion for this field and my excitement to enter it. Not to mention, by spending this extra time with the curriculum in a deeper fashion than in regular classrooms, I am pleased to have a greater knowledge with these accounting topics, which proved worthy during my internship and, hopefully, will only continue to push me farther in my future career as an accounting professional. This thesis was completed during the 2021-2022 academic year to fulfill the requirements of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College

COVID-19 vaccination and unemployment risk: lessons from the Italian crisis

This paper analyzes the impact of mobility contraction on employee furlough and excess deaths in Italy during the COVID-19 crisis. Our approach exploits rainfall patterns across Italian administrative regions as a source of exogenous variation in human mobility to pinpoint the causal effect of mobility restrictions on excess deaths and furlough workers. Results confirm that the first countrywide lockdown has effectively curtailed the COVID-19 epidemics restricting it mainly to the northern part of the country, with the drawback of a countrywide increase in unemployment risk. Our analysis points out that a mobility contraction of 1% leads to a mortality reduction of 0.6%, but it induces an increase of 10% in Wage Guarantee Funds allowed hours. We discuss return-to-work policies and prioritizing policies for administering COVID-19 vaccines in the most advanced stage of a vaccination campaign when the healthy active population is left to be vaccinated

Sustainability and Resilience in the Dutch Health System

The Dutch health system provides broad universal health care coverage and is based on theprinciples of regulated competition. According to the OECD (2022), it is one of the best healthsystems in the world with regard to access to health care, equity and clinical outcomes. However,as also concluded by the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR, 2021), as withother health systems, it faces important sustainability and resilience challenges, some of whichwere exposed and exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic.This report provides a comprehensive overview of the Dutch health system’s key features acrossthe seven domains of the PHSSR framework: health system governance, health system financing,workforce, medicines and technology, health service delivery, population health and environmentalsustainability. For each of these domains, the aim of the report is to (1) produce a criticalassessment of the country’s most salient strengths, weaknesses and threats regarding thesustainability and resilience of its health system and (2) derive recommendations for health carepolicy.In addition to the seven domains mentioned above, we present two case studies. The first focuseson the resilience of the Dutch health system to the financial shock caused by the COVID-19pandemic. The second examines whether collaboration (aimed at reducing coordination problemsand facilitating integrated health care) and competition are reconcilable in the Dutch health system.<br/

Biontech, translating science into survival- biontech company overview & financialL forecast

This report is part of the “BioNTech Equity Research” report and provides a company presentation for BioNTech from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view. Furthermore, it discusses the logic and drivers behind the Financial Statements forecast constructed by the two authors of the annexed joint report

Implications of the COVID-19 trajectory for the evaluation of hand hygiene interventions: Secondary analysis of the Soapp trial.

Hand hygiene behavior is crucial to counter the spread of infectious diseases. However, its adoption during the early stages of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic showed temporal fluctuations associated with the trajectory of the pandemic (e.g. new COVID-19 infections). Such associations can confound conclusions about the effectiveness of interventions aimed at promoting hand hygiene during a pandemic. In this study, we performed a secondary analysis of a dataset from the optimization phase of Soapp, an app to promote hand hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic. We used a longitudinal study design to test whether the associations between the pandemic trajectory and hand hygiene behavior were still present one year after the outbreak (primary outcome) and whether they impacted conclusions about the effectiveness of Soapp (secondary outcome). Participants (N = 216) were randomized to different versions of Soapp and used an electronic diary to self-report their hand hygiene behavior multiple times during the study. We considered the following indicators of the COVID-19 pandemic from the country of Switzerland in the period between March and August 2021: total cases/deaths, increases in recent new cases/deaths, new cases/deaths, and number of administered doses of vaccine. Data were analyzed using a multilevel approach. Results suggested that there were no significant associations between hand hygiene and the indicators of the pandemic trajectory. However, models including total cases/deaths impacted the conclusions about Soapp's effectiveness. Implications from this study are that the development and evaluation of hand hygiene interventions during a pandemic context should account for the trajectory indicators to maximize their effectiveness and control for confounding effects