2024/03/21 by Maddalena Donà, Pieter Trapman, Donà, Maddalena +1
Medicine · Social Sciences · #Environmental health #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Mathematics #FOS: Physical sciences #Medicine #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #Probability (math.PR) #Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy #Virology
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.18859
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
openalex publication_date 2024/03/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We model the impact of local vaccine mandates on the spread of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases, which in the absence of vaccines will mainly affect children. Examples of such diseases are measles, rubella, mumps and pertussis. To model the spread of the pathogen, we use a stochastic SIR (Susceptible, Infectious, Recovered) model with two levels of mixing in a closed population, often referred to as the household model. In this model individuals make local contacts within a specific small subgroup of the population (e.g. within a household or a school class), while they also make global contacts with random people in the population at a much lower rate than the rate of local contacts. We consider what happens if schools are given freedom to impose vaccine mandates on all of their pupils, except for the pupils that are exempt from vaccination because of medical reasons. We investigate how such a mandate affects the probability of an outbreak of a disease and the probability that a pupil that is medically exempt from vaccination, gets infected during an outbreak. We show that if the population vaccine coverage is close to the herd-immunity level then both probabilities may increase if local vaccine mandates are implemented. This is caused by unvaccinated pupils moving to schools without mandates.