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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 18: Networks II (with SOE)
DY 18.5: Talk
Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 11:15–11:30, H 0110
The vaccination dilemma with imperfect effectiveness — •Bin Wu1,2, Feng Fu1, and Long Wang1 — 1Center for Systems and Control, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China — 2Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön 24306, Germany
Achieving widespread population immunity by voluntary vaccination poses a major challenge for public health administration [1]. The situation is complicated even more by imperfect vaccines. How the vaccine efficacy affects individuals' vaccination behavior has yet to be fully answered. To address this issue, we combine a game theoretical model of vaccination behavior with an epidemiological process. Our analysis shows that, in a population of self-interested individuals, the vaccine uptake level increases rapidly as the effectiveness of vaccination increases. Moreover, when the basic reproductive number exceeds a certain threshold, all individuals opt for vaccination for an intermediate region of vaccine efficacy. We further show that increasing effectiveness of vaccination always increases the number of effectively vaccinated individuals and therefore attenuates the epidemic strain. The results suggest that although increases in vaccination effectiveness lead to increased uptake level, it may drop due to free-riding effects. Nonethelss, the impact of the epidemic is mitigated by more effective vaccines [2].
[1] Rino Rappuoli, Science 316: 1287 (2007)
[2] Bin Wu, Feng Fu and Long Wang, PLoS ONE 6(6): e20577 (2011)