Overview of Vaccine Field Studies: Types of Effects and Designs

Abstract

Vaccination produces many different types of effects in individuals and in populations. The scientific and public health questions of interest determine the choice of measures of effect and study designs. Here we review some of the various measures and study designs for evaluating different effects of vaccination.

Key Words:

• Efficacy
• Infectious disease
• Vaccine

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work was partially supported by NIH NIAID grants R01-AI32042.

Notes

*From Halloran et al. (1997), Am J. Epidemiol 146:789–803, Reproduced with permission. The subscripts 0 and 1 denote unvaccinated and vaccinated people, respectively. Population A contains both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. All people in population B are unvaccinated (see Fig. 1). The subscripts S, I, and T denote susceptibility, infectiousness, and combined effects, respectively. The Cox proportional hazards estimator is denoted by e ^{β _i} . Time has been omitted from the table for notational clarity.

^†VE, vaccine efficacy/effectiveness; NA, not applicable.