Preventing epidemics with age-specific vaccination schedules.

A method is proposed for computing the coverage required to prevent epidemics by age-specific vaccination schedules. The method applies in a very general setting and provides explicit expressions in many cases. It can accommodate vaccination doses administered at different ages, heterogeneity among individuals of different ages, a community structured into households, and waning of vaccine-induced immunity. A comparison of results for two specific community settings, with analogous parameter values, indicates that the immunity coverage required to prevent epidemics in a community of households is less than that required for a community of uniformly mixing individuals.