{"doi":"10.1101/2020.08.14.20175257","title":"Vaccine optimization for COVID-19, who to vaccinate first?","abstract":"A vaccine, when available, will likely become our best tool to control the current COVID-19 pandemic. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, vaccine shortages will likely occur. Using an age-stratified mathematical model paired with optimization algorithms, we determined optimal vaccine allocation for four different metrics (deaths, symptomatic infections, and maximum non-ICU and ICU hospitalizations) under many scenarios. We find that a vaccine with effectiveness ≥50% would be enough to substantially mitigate the ongoing pandemic provided that a high percentage of the population is optimally vaccinated. When minimizing deaths, we find that for low vaccine effectiveness, irrespective of vaccination coverage, it is optimal to allocate vaccine to high-risk (older) age-groups first. In contrast, for higher vaccine effectiveness, there is a switch to allocate vaccine to high-transmission (younger) age-groups first for high vaccination coverage. While there are other societal and ethical considerations, this work can provide an evidence-based rationale for vaccine prioritization.","journal":"medRxiv","year":2020,"id":118306,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":123,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9529,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":551225,"name":"Julie Eaton","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":550273,"name":"Tiffany Leung","orcid":"0000-0002-9075-4134","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":32390,"name":"Elizabeth R. Brown","orcid":"0000-0003-4286-2111","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":466087,"name":"Laura Matrajt","orcid":"0000-0003-4495-7245","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":51,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:13:58.531532Z","pmid":"32817963","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}