Design and Analysis of Vaccine Studies

Widespread immunization has many different kinds of effects in individuals and populations, including in the unvaccinated individuals. The challenge is in understanding and estimating all of these effects. This book presents a unified conceptual framework of the different effects of vaccination at the individual and at the population level. The book covers many different vaccine effects, including vaccine efficacy for susceptibility, for disease, for post-infection outcomes, and for infectiousness. The book includes methods for evaluating indirect, total and overall effects of vaccination programs in populations. Topics include household studies, evaluating correlates of immune protection, and applications of casual inference. Material on concepts of infectious disease epidemiology, transmission models, casual inference, and vaccines provides background for the reader. This is the first book to present vaccine evaluation in this comprehensive conceptual framework.

This book is intended for colleagues and students in statistics, biostatistics, epidemiology, and infectious diseases. Most essential concepts are described in simple language accessible to epidemiologists, followed by technical material accessible to statisticians.