Indirect protection by reducing transmission: ending the pandemic with SARS-CoV-2 vaccination

Abstract

It is remarkable that, in less than 1 year since the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic began, multiple vaccines using a variety of platforms have demonstrated high efficacy for protection against symptomatic COVID-19 in randomized controlled trials. This protection appears to be especially potent against severe COVID-19, with sizable reductions in severe outcomes now being confirmed in real-world settings at a much larger scale. The direct protection against disease measured by the clinical trials is important, but whether and to what extent the vaccines provide indirect protection by reducing transmission is also of great consequence in controlling and eventually ending the pandemic. Therefore, understanding the effects of vaccines on transmission is key to deploying evidence-based population vaccination plans, recommendations for the public, and policies for use of nonpharmaceutical interventions with varying degrees of effectiveness in this next stage of the pandemic.

Rights

Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Infectious Diseases Society of America. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact: journals.permissions@oup.com .

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofab259

Repository URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/24734