Abstract
Lassa fever is an emerging zoonotic disease caused by Lassa virus, a priority pathogen identified by the World Health Organization as having pandemic potential. Multiple vaccines aimed at preventing Lassa fever are currently in development, creating a need to assess how best to administer them once licensed for human use. In this talk, I will present a series of modelling studies conducted to project the potential impacts of Lassa vaccination on population health and economies. We use a pre-existing zoonosis risk map as a starting point to generate the first burden of disease estimates for Lassa fever throughout West Africa. Against this backdrop, we evaluate the benefits of population-wide preventive vaccination versus targeted outbreak response vaccination, and predict the cost-effectiveness of targeting vaccination to different age and sex groups, including children, adults, women of childbearing age and the elderly. We also model the emergence of a hypothetical ‘Lassa-X’ pandemic, and project impacts of reactive vaccination in line with the goals of the 100 Days Mission.

Bio
David Smith is Senior Researcher in the Health Economics Research Centre at the Nuffield Department of Population Health. David is an infectious disease modeller with broad interests in emerging infectious diseases and AMR. He uses transmission modelling within health-economic evaluation frameworks to inform intervention design.