2017-02-07
The benefits of combining early aspecific vaccination with later specific vaccination
Publication
Publication
Timing is of crucial importance for successful vaccination. To avoid a large outbreak, vaccines are
administered preferably as quickly as possible. However, in the early stages of an outbreak the information
on the disease is limited and waiting with the intervention allows to design a more tailored vaccination
strategy. In this paper we study the resulting tradeoff between timing of vaccination and the effectiveness
of the response.
We model disease progression using the seminal SIR model, and consider a decision maker who
allocates her budget over two vaccine types: an early aspecific vaccine and a later specific vaccine. We
analytically characterize the switching curve separating the parameter space region where the late specific
vaccine is preferred from the region where the early aspecific type is preferred. More importantly, we
show that the decision maker should not only consider pure strategies, i.e., strategies which spend the
entire budget on one of the types. Instead, she should suitably invest in both vaccine types to benefit
both from the early response and from the good vaccine. We prove that at the switching curve, such
a hybrid strategy is strictly better than either of the pure strategies due to the non-linear dynamics
of epidemics. Numerical experiments show that the associated benefit of hybrid strategies over pure
strategies in terms of reduction of the number of infections may be more than 50%. Such experiments
also substantiate our restriction to two vaccine types.
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hdl.handle.net/1765/99515 | |
Econometric Institute Research Papers | |
Organisation | Erasmus School of Economics |
Westerink-Duijzer, E., van Jaarsveld, W., & Dekker, R. (2017). The benefits of combining early aspecific vaccination with later specific vaccination (No. EI2017-03). Econometric Institute Research Papers. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1765/99515 |