This article is a Preprint
Preprints are preliminary research reports that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Preprints posted online allow authors to receive rapid feedback and the entire scientific community can appraise the work for themselves and respond appropriately. Those comments are posted alongside the preprints for anyone to read them and serve as a post publication assessment.
Vaccine nationalism and the dynamics and control of SARS-CoV-2 (preprint)
medrxiv; 2021.
Preprint
in English
| medRxiv | ID: ppzbmed-10.1101.2021.06.02.21258229
ABSTRACT
Vaccines provide powerful tools to mitigate the enormous public health and economic costs that the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic continues to exert globally, yet vaccine distribution remains unequal between countries. To examine the potential epidemiological and evolutionary impacts of 'vaccine nationalism', we extend previous models to include simple scenarios of stockpiling. In general, we find that stockpiling vaccines by countries with high availability leads to large increases in infections in countries with low vaccine availability, the magnitude of which depends on the strength and duration of natural and vaccinal immunity. Additionally, a number of subtleties arise when the populations and transmission rates in each country differ depending on evolutionary assumptions and vaccine availability. Furthermore, the movement of infected individuals between countries combined with the possibility of increases in viral transmissibility may greatly magnify local and combined infection numbers, suggesting that countries with high vaccine availability must invest in surveillance strategies to prevent case importation. Dose-sharing is likely a high-return strategy because equitable allocation brings non-linear benefits and also alleviates costs of surveillance (e.g. border testing, genomic surveillance) in settings where doses are sufficient to maintain cases at low numbers. Across a range of immunological scenarios, we find that vaccine sharing is also a powerful tool to decrease the potential for antigenic evolution, especially if infections after the waning of natural immunity contribute most to evolutionary potential. Overall, our results stress the importance of equitable global vaccine distribution.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
Preprints
Database:
medRxiv
Language:
English
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Preprint
Similar
MEDLINE
...
LILACS
LIS