Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-5r2nc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-30T23:26:40.710Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Vaccination with Unknown Indirect Effects

from Part II - Analyses of Planning Problems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2025

Charles F. Manski
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
Get access

Summary

I discuss my research on vaccination planning. Social interactions in treatment response make infectious disease a core concern of public health policy. Spread of infection creates a negative external effect. Preventive administration of vaccines may reduce disease transmission. In a decentralized healthcare system, infected and at-risk persons may not adequately recognize the social implications of their actions. Hence, there may be a rationale for government to seek to influence treatment of infectious diseases. Policies range from quarantines of infected persons to mandatory vaccination to subsidization of vaccines and drugs. I focus on a prevalent difficulty, being scarcity of evidence about how interventions affect illness. Randomized trials, which have been central to evaluation of treatments for noninfectious diseases, are less informative about treatment of infectious diseases. I develop minimax regret policy based on credible assumptions. I first consider a simple representative-agent setting in which members of a large population share identical cost of vaccination, cost of illness, probability of vaccine effectiveness, and probability of illness when unvaccinated or unsuccessfully vaccinated. I then generalize to vaccination of a heterogeneous population.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×