Incorporating changeable attitudes toward vaccination into an SIR infectious disease model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mechanistic SIR model incorporating vaccination attitudes, revealing how opinion shifts can destabilize disease equilibria and lead to oscillatory outbreaks.

Contribution

It develops a novel model combining epidemiological status and vaccination attitudes, analyzing how attitude changes impact disease dynamics.

Findings

Attitude changes can destabilize endemic equilibria.

Disease prevalence influences vaccination attitudes and disease stability.

Limit cycles can emerge from attitude-driven feedback loops.

Abstract

We develop a mechanistic model that classifies individuals both in terms of epidemiological status (SIR) and vaccination attitude (willing or unwilling), with the goal of discovering how disease spread is influenced by changing opinions about vaccination. Analysis of the model identifies existence and stability criteria for both disease-free and endemic disease equilibria. The analytical results, supported by numerical simulations, show that attitude changes induced by disease prevalence can destabilize endemic disease equilibria, resulting in limit cycles.