Sarah Alahmadi (University of Southampton)

Speaker: Sarah Alahmadi (University of Southampton)

Title: Intervention campaigns to combat anti-vaccine social contagion and their impact on infectious disease dynamics: A computational approach

Abstract: Vaccination is essential in combating infectious diseases and mitigating the extent of disease outbreaks. However, vaccine hesitancy represents a significant obstacle in the vaccination process. A key driver of this hesitancy is the spread of negative vaccine-related information within social networks. This potentially can lead to larger disease outbreaks due to the clustering of unprotected individuals influenced by this information, who may then choose to remain unvaccinated. In this study, through a coupled agent-based model that integrates vaccine opinions and disease diffusion processes, we aim to design an optimal counter-campaign to negative information. We address the problem as a constrained optimization problem with a limited budget, aiming to minimize the epidemic size through minimizing the number of anti-vaccine opinion adopters. Our strategy aims to optimally allocate the budget based on the evolution of the anti-vaccine influence diffusion. We demonstrate that early intervention targeting individuals vulnerable to anti-vaccine influence within their social networks is an effective strategy for containing negative diffusion. However, as anti-vaccine adopters cluster into larger groups, it becomes crucial to protect the bridging regions between these groups to curb the expansion of unprotected communities and control the spread of epidemics.