Effect of Vaccine Dose Intervals: Considering Immunity Levels, Vaccine Efficacy, and Strain Variants for Disease Control Strategy

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical model to analyze how vaccine dose intervals affect immunity, efficacy, and strain variants, providing insights for optimizing vaccination strategies during epidemics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel immuno-epidemic model incorporating multiple doses and comorbidities to evaluate optimal vaccination timing and its impact on disease control.

Findings

Vaccine dose intervals significantly influence disease spread.

Multiple doses create a hysteresis effect in immunity levels.

Optimal dosing strategies depend on immunity and strain efficacy.

Abstract

In this study, we present an immuno-epidemic model to understand mitigation options during an epidemic break. The model incorporates comorbidity and multiple-vaccine doses through a system of coupled integro-differential equations to analyze the epidemic rate and intensity from a knowledge of the basic reproduction number and time-distributed rate functions. Our modeling results show that the interval between vaccine doses is a key control parameter that can be tuned to significantly influence disease spread. We show that multiple doses induce a hysteresis effect in immunity levels that offers a better mitigation alternative compared to frequent vaccination which is less cost-effective while being more intrusive. Optimal dosing intervals, emphasizing the cost-effectiveness of each vaccination effort, and determined by various factors such as the level of immunity and efficacy of vaccines against different strains, appear to be crucial in disease management. The model is sufficiently generic that can be extended to accommodate specific disease forms.