Prime First Vaccine Campaign Proves Effective in Stopping Spread of COVID-19

The “prime first” vaccine campaign is proving to be the most effective technique at stopping the spread of COVID-19, results of a new study by AIP Publishing show.

"We have this giant degree of uncertainty about the parameters of COVID-19," Jan Nagler, PhD, associate professor of computer science at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, said in a statement.

"We acknowledge that we don't know these precise values, so we sample over the entire parameter space,” he said. “We give a nice idea of when prime first campaigns are better with respect to saving lives than prime boost vaccination."

The campaign is a technique that gives a first dose of a vaccination to the largest number of individuals in a population, then, when the majority is vaccinated, goes back to give out the second dose of the vaccine.

Investigators from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management and the University of California in Los Angeles highlight which conditions would make the “prime first” campaign most effective at stopping the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

"Our results suggest that better estimates of immunity waning rates are important to decide if prime first protocols are more effective than prime boost vaccination," Lucas Böttcher. PhD, assistant professor for computational social sciences at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, said in the statement.

When a country is under supply constraints, the advantages of vaccinating twice as many individuals may outweigh the advantages of the “prime boost” vaccine campaign, which is fully vaccinating a fewer number of individuals.

Investigators found that the vaccine waning rate is the most important factor in the decision. They hope that with this model, there would be more vaccination protocols that could help to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Reference

COVID-19 vaccination strategies: when is one dose better than two? EurekAlert. News release. October 19, 2021. Accessed on October 19, 2021. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/931762