Associated organisationsImperial College London · University of CambridgeEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£3.1M
PeriodSept 2022 — Aug 2027
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Climate change is already shifting where and when infectious diseases strike, and this project will model how vaccination strategies must adapt in response. The Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC) has spent the past decade producing estimates of disease burden and vaccine impact. This new grant extends that work to a question that has become urgent: how will climate change alter the transmission of five major infections—malaria, dengue, yellow fever, cholera, and meningitis—especially in low- and middle-income countries? The researchers will model long-term shifts in disease range and burden, the effects of more frequent extreme weather events, and the optimal timing of routine or reactive vaccination campaigns. If successful, the work will give health ministries and global stockpile managers concrete, data-driven guidance on where to pre-position vaccines, when to launch emergency campaigns, and how to adjust routine immunisation schedules as seasons shift. The project also funds two new modelling groups in sub-Saharan Africa, building local capacity to sustain this analysis beyond the grant period. The result could be fewer outbreaks and more efficient use of limited vaccine supplies in a warming world.
View original technical description
The Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC) was founded in 2016 to deliver a more sustainable, efficient, and transparent approach to generating disease burden and vaccine impact estimates. This grant will enable VIMC to better assess the implications of climate change for vaccination strategy, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Two interlinked research strands will: (a) assess the long-term impacts of climate change on disease range, burden and strategic implications for vaccine strategy and stockpiling; (b) examine how climate drives seasonal variation in disease transmission and burden, the impacts of increasingly frequent extreme climate events for disease burden, and model optimal prophylactic or reactive vaccination campaigns for mitigation. Programmatic research priorities will be informed by consultation with the VIMC stakeholder network. We will prioritise five climate-sensitive infections – malaria, dengue, yellow fever, cholera, and meningitis. The research will be collaborative with academic partners in LMICs most affected by these infections. It will also be cross-fertilizing between disease areas, developing generic inferential and projection platforms, software, and data resources. In addition, the grant will support capacity- strengthening via the recruitment of two foundational VIMC modelling groups from sub-Saharan Africa with expertise in health economic, operational, climate and/or geospatial modelling.
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