The balancing role of distribution speed against varying efficacy levels of COVID-19 vaccines under variants
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Abstract
During a pandemic, vaccination plays an important role in reducing the infection spread or adverse outcomes such as hospitalizations and deaths. However, a vaccine’s overall public health impact depends not only on its initial efficacy, but also its efficacy against emerging variants and ease and speed of distribution. For example, mutations in SARS-CoV-2 raised concerns about diminishing vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 caused by particular variants. Furthermore, due to supply-chain challenges, the accessibility and distribution of the vaccines have been hindered in many regions, especially in low-income countries, while the second or third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has occurred due to the variants. Hence, we evaluated the interactions between the speed of distribution and efficacy against infection of multiple vaccines when variants emerge by utilizing a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Deceased model and assessing the level of infection attack rate . Our results show that speed is a key factor to a successful immunization strategy to control the pandemic even when the emerging variants may reduce the efficacy of a vaccine. Understanding the interactions between speed and efficacy and distributing vaccines that are available as quickly as possible are crucial to eradicate the pandemic before new variants spread.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.09.21255217: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:We acknowledge some limitations of this study. First, our SIR-D model did not capture the full trajectory of SARS-CoV-2. Tindale et al. (2020) reported that the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 starts prior to symptom onset and Cevik et al. (2020) reported that the COVID-19 is most contagious in the first five days of illness, which we did not …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.09.21255217: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:We acknowledge some limitations of this study. First, our SIR-D model did not capture the full trajectory of SARS-CoV-2. Tindale et al. (2020) reported that the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 starts prior to symptom onset and Cevik et al. (2020) reported that the COVID-19 is most contagious in the first five days of illness, which we did not incorporate into our model [33, 34]. In addition, we assumed that the population gains immunity as soon as they receive effective vaccines and that every type of vaccine requires a single dose. In practice, all the authorized vaccines, except Johnson & Johnson’s adenovirus-vectored vaccine, require two doses with three to four weeks apart application and it may take several days to gain immunity after vaccination. Moreover, we did not consider any type of non-pharmaceutical interventions. Depending on the number of people who conform to the interventions, such as social distancing and mask mandates, the probability of infectious contacts may vary over time. Lastly, variants may be more transmissible, but we assumed a constant transmission rate in each simulation. Overall, our results suggest that the administration of a vaccine with high efficacy against both the original strain and the variants may not always lead to a low number of cumulative infections if it cannot be distributed as quickly as other vaccine types with lower efficacies. Despite the vast efforts for worldwide vaccination, the vaccine distribution has been an ongoing challeng...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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