Protective vaccine efficacy when vaccine response is random

Niels G. Becker*, Sergey Utev

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    9 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Vaccine induced protection against infection is often random because of primary vaccine failures and variation in the immune systems of hosts. We introduce a concept of protective vaccine efficacy in terms of mean relative susceptibility of vaccinated individuals and derive both a lower and an upper bound for it. These bounds apply for all distributions of the vaccine response and can be estimated from data on the size of a major epidemic. Standard errors are given for estimates of the bounds. Bounds are also given for the vaccination coverage required to prevent epidemics and these are also estimable from data on the size of a major epidemic. The results are applied to data on an outbreak of mumps.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)29-42
    Number of pages14
    JournalBiometrical Journal
    Volume44
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2002

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