How Efficacious Must a COVID-19 Coronavirus Vaccine be to Prevent or Stop an Epidemic by Itself

Given the continuing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and much of the U.S. implementing social distancing due to the lack of alternatives, there has been a push to develop a vaccine to eliminate the need for social distancing.

In 2020, we developed a computational model of the U.S. simulating the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus and vaccination.

Simulation experiments revealed that when vaccine efficacy exceeded 70%, coverage exceeded 60%, and vaccination occurred on day 1, the attack rate dropped to 22% with daily cases not exceeding 3.2 million (reproductive rate, R0, 2.5). When R0 was 3.5, the attack rate dropped to 41% with daily cases not exceeding 14.4 million. Increasing coverage to 75% when vaccination occurred by day 90 resulted in 5% attack rate and daily cases not exceeding 258,029when R0 was 2.5 and a 26% attack rate and maximum daily cases of 22.6 million when R0 was 3.5. When vaccination did not occur until day 180, coverage (i.e., those vaccinated plus those otherwise immune) had to reach 100%. A vaccine with an efficacy between 40% and 70% could still obviate the need for other measures under certain circumstances such as much higher, and in some cases, potentially unachievable, vaccination coverages.

Our study found that to either prevent or largely extinguish an epidemic without any other measures (e.g., social distancing), the vaccine has to have an efficacy of at least 70%.