The Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium is delighted to have secured renewed funding of £12.8 million (USD $15.4 million) for the next five years, for a new phase of the project. Funding comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Wellcome Trust.
This new phase – ‘VIMC 2.0’ – will see a greater focus on modelling to address questions for vaccine policy and practice, working with a more diverse international community of modellers. As climate change becomes increasingly important, the Consortium will also establish a new research programme on the impact of climate change on climate-sensitive vaccine-preventable diseases.
The Consortium’s secretariat is based at Imperial College London and will manage day-to-day operations. We are excited to welcome Professor Caroline Trotter as our new Consortium Director. Professor Neil Ferguson will continue as Deputy Director of the Consortium, leading on the climate-related research programme. A new Stakeholder Group will advise on the Consortium’s strategic direction; set high-level priorities for addressing policy-relevant questions; and assist in the dissemination of outputs and provide feedback as ‘consumers’ of vaccine impact estimates.
By 2027, our core aims are:
to provide reliable and accessible estimates of vaccine impact across the Gavi portfolio
to address critical modelling-related vaccine policy questions raised by stakeholders who will be dynamically engaged in our work
to translate the Consortium’s modelling to real-world policy that improves health outcomes
to foster a diverse international community of vaccine impact modellers, inclusive of modellers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)
to provide training in infectious disease modelling and its application to vaccine-preventable diseases for both modellers and policymakers.
In addition, more specific aims of our research programme on climate change are:
to better characterise the mechanistic relationship between environment, climate and disease transmission
to assess implications of long-term climate change for disease burden, range and routine vaccination
to optimise control programmes to respond to seasonal variation in disease burden and the consequences of increasingly frequent extreme climate events.
The Consortium was originally established in 2016, to deliver a more sustainable, efficient, and transparent approach to generating estimates of disease burden and vaccine impact for investments by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. To date, it has successfully created a rigorous methodology and platform for combining and analysing modelled estimates across 12 vaccine antigens and 112 countries. These independent and technically sound impact estimates were core to Gavi’s 2021-2025 replenishment, which raised USD $8.8billion for immunisation in low and low-middle income countries and were used to set targets for the Immunization Agenda 2030 strategy.
We now look forward to working collaboratively with a wide range of partners to achieve our new goals.
About Wellcome: Wellcome supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. It supports discovery research into life, health and wellbeing, and is taking on three worldwide health challenges: mental health, infectious disease and climate and health.