Approximating costs for reaching zero-dose children and tools to identify optimal vaccine dosing schedules
Featuring presentations on current vaccine research conducted at the Boston University School of Public Health.
This webinar will feature two speakers from Boston University School of Public Health, Dr Allison Portnoy and Dr Kayoko Shioda, speaking on their current vaccine research.
Approximating reaching zero-dose children with standardised country-level routine outreach vaccine delivery unit cost estimates
The Immunization Agenda 2030 aims to reach all people with immunisation services, including ‘zero-dose’ children—children who have not received any routine vaccine. To plan for the efforts to reach zero-dose children with needed vaccinations and make informed decisions to improve immunisation coverage and equity, decision-makers need to know how much these efforts will cost. Without widely available primary data, there is a need for proxy estimates for the costs of extending vaccine delivery to zero-dose children who are typically part of disadvantaged and hard-to-reach populations. This project aims to approximate the costs of reaching zero-dose children with standardised country-level estimates of routine outreach vaccine delivery unit costs for low-income (LI) and lower middle-income (LMI) countries.
Speaker
Dr Allison Portnoy
Dr Allison Portnoy is an Assistant Professor of Global Health at Boston University School of Public Health focused on vaccine decision science and policy. Her research includes economic evaluation and public health policy, simulation modeling, health equity, and the impact of vaccination on population health and economic outcomes. She is particularly interested in broadening the value of vaccination in high-burden settings. Her ongoing work spans multiple diseases areas, including human papillomavirus (HPV), measles, and tuberculosis (TB).
Target trial emulation for vaccine evaluation
Target trial emulation (TTE) is a causal inference framework that allows us to emulate a hypothetical target trial using observational data. TTE has become a popular research method to evaluate treatment and health interventions due to its practical and methodological advantages, serving as an important alternative to randomized controlled trials. However, its application to infectious disease outcomes requires careful consideration, as infectious disease transmission violates the assumption of no interference. During the talk, Dr. Shioda will discuss that TTE can be a powerful tool to identify the optimal dosing schedule of various vaccines, including the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, and discuss limitations of the current TTE framework and potential solutions.
Speaker
Dr Kayoko Shioda
Dr Kayoko Shioda is an infectious disease epidemiologist and veterinarian working at the intersection of global health, One Health, vaccine epidemiology, and Bayesian statistics. Her research integrates veterinary medicine, epidemiological methods, mathematical modeling, and Bayesian statistics to tackle issues in infectious disease epidemiology, with two major foci: 1) One Health with climate change and 2) vaccine epidemiology. The overall objective that guides her One Health research is to propose climate-resilient measures to control zoonotic pathogens based on a better understanding of the transmission dynamics among/between humans, animals, the environment, and climate factors in resource-limited settings. For vaccine epidemiology, Dr Shioda aims to inform vaccine policy by developing novel analytic methods for intervention evaluation, especially in resource-limited settings where public health data often have various challenges that make it difficult to draw reliable conclusions. Through her research projects, she has had the privilege of working with local, state, federal, and international organizations as well as =30 countries in her career.
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- Please note this event is virtual only.
- Please note that the recording link will be listed on this page when available.
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