1 Answers
Fractional dose vaccination is a strategy to reduce the dose of a vaccine to achieve a vaccination policy goal that is more difficult to achieve with conventional vaccination approaches, including deploying a vaccine faster in a pandemic, reaching more individuals in the setting of limited healthcare budgets, or minimizing side effects due to the vaccine.
Fractional dose vaccination exploits the nonlinear dose-response characteristics of a vaccine: If two persons can be vaccinated instead of one, but each one gets 2/3 of the protective efficacy, there is a net benefit at society scale for reducing the number of infections. If the healthcare budget is limited or only a limited amount of vaccine is available during the early phase of a pandemic, this can make a difference for the total number of infections.
Fractional dose vaccination uses a fraction of the standard dose of a regular vaccine that is administered by the same, or an alternative route.
Fractional dose vaccination has been used or proposed in a number of relevant infectious poverty diseases including yellow fever, poliomyelitis, COVID-19.