Impact of viral drift on vaccination dynamics and patterns of seasonal influenza

Much research has been devoted to the determination of optimal vaccination strategies for seasonal influenza epidemics. However, less attention has been paid to whether this optimization can be achieved within the context of viral drift.

We developed a mathematical model that links different intra-seasonal dynamics of vaccination and infection to investigate the effect of viral drift on optimal vaccination for minimizing the total number of infections. The model was computationally implemented using a seasonal force of infection, with estimated parameters from the published literature.

Simulation results show that the pattern of large seasonal epidemics is strongly correlated with the duration of specific cross-protection immunity induced by natural infection. Considering a random vaccination, our simulations suggest that the effect of vaccination on epidemic patterns is largely influenced by the duration of protection induced by strain-specific vaccination. We found that the protection efficacy (i.e., reduction of susceptibility to infection) of vaccine is a parameter that could influence these patterns, particularly when the duration of vaccine-induced cross-protection is lengthened.

Given the uncertainty in the timing and nature of antigenically drifted variants, the findings highlight the difficulty in determining optimal vaccination dynamics for seasonal epidemics. Our study suggests that the short- and long-term impacts of vaccination on seasonal epidemics should be evaluated within the context of population-pathogen landscape for influenza evolution.