Epidemiological impact of waning immunization on a vaccinated population

Abstract

This is an epidemiological SIRV model based study that is designed to analyze the impact of vaccination in containing infection spread, in a 4-tiered population compartment comprised of susceptible, infected, recovered and vaccinated agents. While many models assume a lifelong protection through vaccination, we focus on the impact of waning immunization due to conversion of vaccinated and recovered agents back to susceptible ones. Two asymptotic states exist, the "disease-free equilibrium" and the "endemic equilibrium"; we express the transitions between these states as function of the vaccination and conversion rates using the basic reproduction number as a descriptor. We find that the vaccination of newborns and adults have different consequences in controlling epidemics. We also find that a decaying disease protection within the recovered sub-population is not sufficient to trigger an epidemic at the linear level. Our simulations focus on parameter sets that could model a disease with waning immunization like pertussis. For a diffusively coupled population, a transition to the endemic state can be initiated via the propagation of a traveling infection wave, described successfully within a Fisher-Kolmogorov framework.