Abstract
The effectiveness of a mass vaccination program can engender its own undoing if individuals choose to not get vaccinated believing that they are already protected by herd immunity. This would appear to be the optimal decision for an individual, based on a strategic appraisal of her costs and benefits, even though she would be vulnerable during subsequent outbreaks if the majority of the population argues in this manner. We investigate how voluntary vaccination can nevertheless emerge in a social network of rational agents, who make informed decisions whether to be vaccinated, integrated with a model of epidemic dynamics. The information available to each agent includes the prevalence of the disease in their local network neighborhood and/or globally in the population, as well as the fraction of their neighbors that are protected against the disease. Crucially, the payoffs governing the decision of agents vary with disease prevalence, resulting in the vaccine uptake behavior changing in response to contagion spreading. The collective behavior of the agents responding to local prevalence can lead to a significant reduction in the final epidemic size, particularly for less contagious diseases having low basic reproduction number . Near the epidemic threshold () the use of local prevalence information can result in divergent responses in the final vaccine coverage. Our results suggest that heterogeneity in the risk perception resulting from the spatio-temporal evolution of an epidemic differentially affects agents’ payoffs, which is a critical determinant of the success of voluntary vaccination schemes.
Highlights
Immunization through the vaccination of populations has been estimated to annually prevent 2-3 million deaths from infectious diseases such as measles, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus [1]
A major factor underlying the success of voluntary vaccination schemes is the public perception about the costs and benefits associated with vaccines
Modeling individual decision-making in the presence of an evolving epidemic using games, we show that spatial heterogeneity in the vaccine-uptake behavior emerges with the spread of disease on social networks
Summary
Immunization through the vaccination of populations has been estimated to annually prevent 2-3 million deaths from infectious diseases such as measles, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus [1]. This number may rise substantially with the development of strategies to further increase global vaccine coverage [2]. A sufficiently high vaccine coverage makes it difficult for the pathogen to find susceptible hosts, thereby conferring herd immunity to the whole population [3, 4] Even those members of the community who are unable to get vaccinated, such as newborns and immune-suppressed individuals, are protected against the disease. Elucidating the mechanisms that promote wider acceptance of vaccination in the population can help explicate the reasons behind the failure of immunization programs
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