Influenza vaccine allocation in tropical settings under constrained resources

Influenza virus seasonality, synchronicity, and vaccine supply differ substantially between temperate and tropical settings, and optimal vaccination strategy may differ on this basis. Many national vaccine recommendations focus on high-risk groups, elderly populations, and healthcare workers despite previous analyses demonstrating broad benefits to vaccinating younger high-contact age groups. In this study, we parameterized an age-structured nonseasonal asynchronous epidemiological model of influenza virus transmission for a tropical low-income setting. We evaluated timing and age allocation of vaccines across vaccine supplies ranging from 10 to 90% using decade-based age groups. Year-round vaccination was beneficial when compared with more concentrated annual vaccine distribution. When targeting a single age group for vaccine prioritization, maximum vaccine allocation to the 10–19 high-contact age group minimized annual influenza mortality for all but one vaccine supply. When evaluating across all possible age allocations, optimal strategies always allocated a plurality of vaccines to school-age children (10–19). The converse, however, was not true as not all strategies allocating a plurality to children aged 10–19 minimized mortality. Allocating a high proportion of vaccine supply to the 10–19 age group is necessary but not sufficient to minimize annual mortality as distribution of remaining vaccine doses to other age groups also needs to be optimized. Strategies focusing on indirect benefits (vaccinating children) showed higher variance in mortality outcomes than strategies focusing on direct benefits (vaccinating the elderly). However, the indirect benefit approaches showed a lower mean mortality and a lower minimum mortality than vaccination focused on the elderly.