Impact of imperfect vaccine, vaccine trade-off and population turnover on infectious disease dynamics

TL;DR

This study models how imperfect vaccines, their trade-offs, and population turnover collectively influence infectious disease dynamics, providing insights for optimizing vaccination strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical model analyzing the combined effects of vaccine imperfections, trade-offs, and population turnover on disease eradication thresholds.

Findings

Minimum vaccination coverage depends on population turnover rate.

Higher vaccine efficiency reduces required coverage.

Trade-offs between vaccine properties significantly impact eradication strategies.

Abstract

Vaccination is essential for the management of infectious diseases, many of which continue to pose devastating public health and economic challenges across the world. However, many vaccines are imperfect having only a partial protective effect in decreasing disease transmission and/or favouring recovery of infected individuals, and possibly exhibiting trade-off between these two properties. Furthermore, population turnover, that is the rate at which individuals enter and exit the population, is another key factor determining the epidemiological dynamics. While these factors have yet been studied separately, we investigate the interplay between the efficiency and property of an imperfect vaccine and population turnover. We build a mathematical model with frequency incidence rate, a recovered compartment, and an heterogeneous host population with respect to vaccination. We first compute the basic reproduction number $\mathcal{R}_0$ and study the global stability of the equilibrium points. Using a sensitivity analysis, we then assess the most influential parameters determining the total number of infected and $\mathcal{R}_0$ over time. We derive analytically and numerically conditions for the vaccination coverage and efficiency to achieve disease eradication ($\mathcal{R}_0 < 1$) assuming different intensity of the population turnover (weak and strong), vaccine properties (transmission and/or recovery) and trade-off between the latter. We show that the minimum vaccination coverage increases with lower population turnover, decreases with higher vaccine efficiency (transmission or recovery), and is increased/decreased by up to 15\% depending on the trade-off between the vaccine properties. We conclude that the coverage target for vaccination campaigns should be evaluated based on the interplay between these factors.