The role of childrens’ vaccination for COVID-19 - Pareto-optimal allocations of vaccines
Abstract
The ultimate goal of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns is to enable the return of societies and economies to a state of normality. While vaccines have been approved for children of age 12 and older, there is an ongoing debate as to whether children should be vaccinated and at what priority, with very different policies being adopted in different countries. In this work, we use mathematical modeling and optimization to study the effect of vaccinating children on the epidemic spread. We consider Pareto-optimal allocations according to competing measures of number of infections and mortality, and systematically study the trade-offs among them. When some weight is given to the number of infections, we find that it is optimal to allocate vaccines to adolescents in age group 10-19, even when they are assumed to be less susceptible than adults. Additionally, we find that in a broad range of scenarios, optimal allocations of vaccines do not include vaccination of age-group 0-9.
Author summary
One of the acute questions public health experts and policymakers currently confront is whether children of age 12 and older, and eventually perhaps younger children, should be vaccinated against COVID-19, and at what priority. Different countries have adopted diverse policies on this issue, while others remain undecided. One of the key considerations in this debate is the impact of children’s vaccination on the epidemic spread. In this work, we use mathematical and computational methods to study this question in a systematic, quantitative way. We compute optimal vaccination allocations, under different criteria for optimality, both including and not including children. To explore tradeoffs among different goals, such as reducing number of infections and reducing mortality, we use the idea of Pareto optimization, which is novel in this field. Our results show that, under a wide range of conditions, optimal vaccine allocations include vaccination of age group 10-19, while the vaccination of age group 0-9 is of lower priority than the vaccination of other age group.
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