Department of Physics, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.
Department of Molecular Genetics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2022 Aug 10;18(8):e1010391. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010391. eCollection 2022 Aug.
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that the process of global vaccination against a novel virus can be a prolonged one. Social distancing measures, that are initially adopted to control the pandemic, are gradually relaxed as vaccination progresses and population immunity increases. The result is a prolonged period of high disease prevalence combined with a fitness advantage for vaccine-resistant variants, which together lead to a considerably increased probability for vaccine escape. A spatial vaccination strategy is proposed that has the potential to dramatically reduce this risk. Rather than dispersing the vaccination effort evenly throughout a country, distinct geographic regions of the country are sequentially vaccinated, quickly bringing each to effective herd immunity. Regions with high vaccination rates will then have low infection rates and vice versa. Since people primarily interact within their own region, spatial vaccination reduces the number of encounters between infected individuals (the source of mutations) and vaccinated individuals (who facilitate the spread of vaccine-resistant strains). Thus, spatial vaccination may help mitigate the global risk of vaccine-resistant variants.
新冠疫情表明，针对新型病毒的全球疫苗接种过程可能会很漫长。最初为控制疫情而采取的社交距离措施，随着疫苗接种的推进和人群免疫力的提高，逐渐放宽。其结果是疾病流行期延长，同时具有疫苗抗性变异的适应优势，这两者共同导致疫苗逃逸的可能性大大增加。提出了一种空间疫苗接种策略，有可能显著降低这种风险。该策略不是在全国范围内均匀分散疫苗接种工作，而是按顺序对国家的不同地理区域进行疫苗接种，迅速使每个区域达到有效的群体免疫。高接种率地区的感染率会较低，反之亦然。由于人们主要在自己的区域内相互作用，因此空间疫苗接种减少了感染个体（突变来源）和接种个体（促进疫苗抗性菌株传播）之间的接触次数。因此，空间疫苗接种可能有助于减轻全球疫苗抗性变异的风险。
