Possible counter-intuitive impact of local vaccine mandates for vaccine-preventable infectious diseases

We modeled the impact of local vaccine mandates on the spread of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases, which in the absence of vaccines will mainly affect children. Examples of such diseases are measles, rubella, mumps, and pertussis. To model the spread of the pathogen, we used a stochastic SIR (susceptible, infectious, recovered) model with two levels of mixing in a closed population, often referred to as the household model. In this model, individuals make local contacts within a specific small subgroup of the population (e.g., within a household or a school class), while they also make global contacts with random people in the population at a much lower rate than the rate of local contacts. We considered what would happen if schools were given freedom to impose vaccine mandates on all of their pupils, except for the pupils that were exempt from vaccination because of medical reasons. We investigated first how such a mandate affected the probability of an outbreak of a disease. Furthermore, we focused on the probability that a pupil that was medically exempt from vaccination, would get infected during an outbreak. We showed that if the population vaccine coverage was close to the herd-immunity level, then both probabilities may increase if local vaccine mandates were implemented. This was caused by unvaccinated pupils possibly being moved to schools without mandates.