Impact of COVID-19-related disruptions to measles, meningococcal A, and yellow fever vaccination in 10 countries
Abstract
Background: Childhood immunisation services have been disrupted by COVID-19. WHO recommends considering outbreak risk using epidemiological criteria when deciding whether to conduct preventive vaccination campaigns during the pandemic.
Methods: We used 2-3 models per infection to estimate the health impact of 50% reduced routine vaccination coverage and delaying campaign vaccination for measles, meningococcal A and yellow fever vaccination in 3-6 high burden countries per infection.
Results: Reduced routine coverage in 2020 without catch-up vaccination may increase measles and yellow fever disease burden in the modelled countries. Delaying planned campaigns may lead to measles outbreaks and increases in yellow fever burden in some countries. For meningococcal A vaccination, short term disruptions in 2020 are unlikely to have a significant impact.
Conclusion: The impact of COVID-19-related disruption to vaccination programs varies between infections and countries.
Funding: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
Data availability
All code, data inputs and outputs used to generate the results in the manuscript (apart from projections about vaccine coverage beyond 2020 which are commercially confidential property of Gavi) are available at: https://github.com/vimc/vpd-covid-phase-I.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1157270 and INV-016832)
- Katy A M Gaythorpe
- Kaja Abbas
- John Huber
- Andromachi Karachaliou
- Niket Thakkar
- Kim Woodruff
- Xiang Li
- Susy Echeverria-Londono
- Matthew Ferrari
- Michael Jackson
- Kevin McCarthy
- Alex T Perkins
- Caroline Trotter
- Mark Jit
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Gaythorpe et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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