Black Box Approaches to the Evaluation of Indirect Effects of Vaccine Deployment
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*Lawrence H. Moulton, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg SPH 

Keywords: herd immunity; indirect effects; community randomized trials

When relatively high proportions of individuals living in communities have received a vaccine, substantial protection may be conferred upon the unvaccinated through reduced risk of transmission. In this presentation, approaches are described for estimating the degree of this extra protection without explicit modeling of person-to-person transmissions. These are implemented via straightforward regression models. Examples are given from observational and community randomized studies of Hib and pneumococcal vaccines.