Middling vaccination rates could leave us vulnerable to variants

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-07-14 09:01

International

Toa Heftiba

Prioritising vulnerable but less mobile groups for COVID-19 vaccination could create a higher risk of vaccine-evading variants emerging, according to international modelling. Researchers created a model to determine how prioritising less vulnerable but more mobile population groups for vaccination would affect the overall outcome, compared to the more intuitive strategy of prioritising the vulnerable who generally are less mobile. They found vaccinating more mobile populations could reduce overall cases of COVID-19, therefore reducing the overall risk of a vaccine-resistant variant emerging, a phenomenon called 'vaccine escape'. Moderate vaccination rates, the researchers say, have the highest risk of vaccine escape.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Vaccine escape in a heterogeneous population: insights for SARS-CoV-2 from a simple model
Royal Society Open Science

The rapid development and deployment of vaccines is the success story of the COVID-19 pandemic. However this comes with the risk of vaccine escape: the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 can mutate to produce a variant to which the vaccines are less effective.

The modelling work in this paper shows that the highest risk for vaccine escape will be at intermediate levels of vaccination, and in particular when the most vulnerable are vaccinated but not the rest of the population. Careful targeting of vaccines towards particular population groups could reduce disease as much as possible whilst limiting the risk of vaccine escape.

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Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Cambridge, UK

Funder: This work was supported by UKRI through the JUNIPER modelling consortium (grant no. MR/V038613/1)

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