Coevolution of Vaccination Opinions and Awareness Affecting the Spread of Epidemics

Abstract

During the last decades, vaccines have been widely adopted to control or eliminate epidemics. Nevertheless, in practice, a vaccine is usually not completely effective, i.e., there may exist some side effects, which cause individuals to possess different opinions regarding vaccination. Thus, opinion transformation plays an important role in determining the range of epidemic infection. Individuals might be aware of risk due to the process of information spreading, which further affects the spread of epidemics. Moreover, awareness seems to affect the opinion transition process in turn. Motivated by these facts, we investigate the coevolution of vaccination opinion and awareness in a three-layered complex network. The opinion dynamics regarding vaccination evolves on the virtual layer, and the information also spreads on the same layer (for simplicity, these two processes are supported by the same topology). In contrast, biological elements carrying the viruses are transmitted through bodily contact on the physical layer. Furthermore, theoretical analyses through Markov chain are also provided for validation. The corresponding experimental analyses are then performed to investigate the effects of spread or loss of awareness on vaccination rate or epidemic size, and the results are presented and discussed.