Social imitation dynamics of vaccination driven by vaccine effectiveness and beliefs
Fig 5
Coevolution of vaccine beliefs and uptake behavior.
Plotted are the hysteresis loops of equilibrium vaccination levels as a function of ( A) the relative cost of vaccination, c, and ( B) vaccine effectiveness, ε. For comparison, we include the simulation results in the absence of any vaccine beliefs (Fig 3) as well as those with fixed vaccine beliefs (Fig 4). Compared to the case without vaccine beliefs, the concurrent spreading of beliefs–where a vaccine-neutral attitude competes with a vaccine-averse attitude alongside the social contagion (imitation) process of vaccine behavior choices–lead to slightly less favorable condition for vaccination. However, this impact is much less severe than in the scenario where a small proportion of individuals hold a vaccine-averse attitude and remain unchanged. Parameters: ( A, B) square lattice with von Neumann neighborhood, initial number of infection seeds I0 = 30, initial number of vaccinated
(50%), initial number of vaccine skeptical individuals 1250 (50%), disease transmission rate
, recovery rate
,
, K = 1. (A) for fixed effectiveness
, and (B) for fixed c = 0.01. Simulation results are averaged over 150 independent runs.