Optimizing the delivery of self-disseminating vaccines in fluctuating wildlife populations.

Zoonotic pathogens spread by wildlife continue to spill into human populations and threaten human lives. A potential way to reduce this threat is by vaccinating wildlife species that harbor pathogens that are infectious to humans. Unfortunately, even in cases where vaccines can be distributed en masse as edible baits, achieving levels of vaccine coverage sufficient for pathogen elimination is rare. Developing vaccines that self-disseminate may help solve this problem by magnifying the impact of limited direct vaccination. Although models exist that quantify how well these self-disseminating vaccines will work when introduced into temporally stable wildlife populations, how well they will perform when introduced into populations with pronounced seasonal population dynamics remains unknown. Here we develop and analyze mathematical models of fluctuating wildlife populations that allow us to study how reservoir ecology, vaccine design, and vaccine delivery interact to influence vaccine coverage and opportunities for pathogen elimination. Our results demonstrate that the timing of vaccine delivery can make or break the success of vaccination programs. As a general rule, the effectiveness of self-disseminating vaccines is optimized by introducing after the peak of seasonal reproduction when the number of susceptible animals is near its maximum. Author summary: Pathogens such as Ebola, rabies, and Lassa virus that usually infect wildlife can jump to the human population. In the worst case, this can lead to outbreaks or pandemics such as happened in 2014 with Ebola and 2019 with SARS-CoV-2. One approach to mitigate the threat of pathogens spilling into the human population is to proactively vaccinate wildlife harboring these pathogens before the pathogens infect humans. With traditional vaccines, administering enough vaccines to the wildlife population to limit pathogen spread is challenging. To address this challenge, recent technological advances have allowed the development of vaccines that allow some degree of spread of the vaccine from animal to animal. However, for a vaccination campaign using these self-disseminating vaccines to be implemented successfully, we need to know when vaccines should be administered. We used mathematical models to explore how the reservoir host's population ecology and properties of the vaccine affect the success of a vaccination campaign. Our results demonstrate that the timing of vaccine delivery relative to seasonal reproduction can make or break the success of vaccination programs. The effectiveness of self-disseminating vaccines is optimized by introducing vaccine after the peak of seasonal reproduction when the number of animals available for vaccination is highest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]