Related papers: Competing Heterogeneities in Vaccine Effectiveness…
We introduce a model of protein evolution to explain limitations in the immune system response to vaccination and disease. The phenomenon of original antigenic sin, wherein vaccination creates memory sequences that can \emph{increase}…
We analyze the effect of homophily in the diffusion of a harmful state between two groups of agents that differ in immunization rates. Homophily has a very different impact on the steady state infection level (that is increasing in…
The initial period of vaccination shows strong heterogeneity between countries' vaccinations rollout, both in the terms of the start of the vaccination process and in the dynamics of the number of people that are vaccinated. A predominant…
Optimization of vaccine allocations among different segments of a heterogeneous population is important for enhancing the effectiveness of vaccination campaigns in reducing the burden of epidemics. Intuitively, it would seem that…
The test-negative design has become popular for evaluating the effectiveness of post-licensure vaccines using observational data. In addition to its logistical convenience on data collection, the design is also believed to control for the…
How to estimate heterogeneity, e.g. the effect of some variable differing across observations, is a key question in political science. Methods for doing so make simplifying assumptions about the underlying nature of the heterogeneity to…
How does immune system evolve functional proteins - potent antibodies - in such a short time? We address this question using a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of humoral immune response with explicitly defined interactions…
Contagion effect refers to the causal effect of peers' behavior on the outcome of an individual in social networks. Contagion can be confounded due to latent homophily which makes contagion effect estimation very hard: nodes in a homophilic…
The aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic saw more severe outcomes for racial minority groups and economically-deprived communities. Such disparities can be explained by several factors, including unequal access to healthcare, as well as the…
We propose a new continuous-discrete mixture regression model which is useful for describing highly censored data. We motivate our investigation based on a case-study in biometry related to measles vaccines in Haiti. In this case-study, the…
Influenza is a contagious respiratory illness that causes significant human morbidity and mortality, affecting 5-15% of the population in a typical epidemic season. Human influenza epidemics are caused by types A and B, with roughly 25% of…
Preventing infectious disease like flu from spreading to large communities is one of the most important issues for humans. One effective strategy is voluntary vaccination, however, there is always the temptation for people refusing to be…
We study the influence of the rate of the attainment of herd immunity (HI), in the absence of an approved vaccine, on the vulnerable population. We essentially ask the question: how hard the evolution towards the desired herd immunity could…
In statistical models for the analysis of time-to-event data, individual heterogeneity is usually accounted for by means of one or more random effects, also known as frailties. In the vast majority of the literature, the random effect is…
The response of the immune system to different vaccination patterns is studied with a simple model. It is argued that the history and characteristics of the pattern defines very different secondary immune responses in the case of infection.…
The test-negative design (TND) is widely used to evaluate vaccine effectiveness in real-world settings. In a TND study, individuals with similar symptoms who seek care are tested, and effectiveness is estimated by comparing vaccination…
We consider the effect of inducement to vaccinate during the spread of an infectious disease on complex networks. Suppose that public resources are finite and that only a small proportion of individuals can be vaccinated freely (complete…
Vaccination is widely recognized as the most effective way of immunization against many infectious diseases. However, unfounded claims about supposed side effects of some vaccines have contributed to spread concern and fear among people,…
Vaccination is essential for the management of infectious diseases, many of which continue to pose devastating public health and economic challenges across the world. However, many vaccines are imperfect having only a partial protective…
In randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of infectious disease interventions, it is well recognized that unmeasured individual heterogeneity at baseline can induce selection bias over time, thereby complicating the interpretation of the…