Prioritizing high-contact occupations raises effectiveness of vaccination campaigns

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Abstract

A twenty-year-old idea from network science is that vaccination campaigns would be more effective if high-contact individuals were preferentially targeted. Implementation is impeded by the ethical and practical problem of differentiating vaccine access based on a personal characteristic that is hard-to-measure and private. Here, we propose the use of occupational category as a proxy for connectedness in a contact network. Using survey data on occupation-specific contact frequencies, we calibrate a model of disease propagation in populations undergoing varying vaccination campaigns. We find that vaccination campaigns that prioritize high-contact occupational groups achieve similar infection levels with half the number of vaccines, while also reducing and delaying peaks. The paper thus identifies a concrete, operational strategy for dramatically improving vaccination efficiency in ongoing pandemics.

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Nunner, H., van de Rijt, A., & Buskens, V. (2022). Prioritizing high-contact occupations raises effectiveness of vaccination campaigns. Scientific Reports, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-04428-9

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