A Novel Representation of Vaccine Efficacy Trial Datasets for Use in Computer Simulation of Vaccination Policy.

Computer simulation is the only method available for evaluating vaccination policy for rare diseases or emergency use of new vaccines. The most realistic simulation of vaccination policy is agent-based simulation (ABS) in which agents have similar socio-demographic characteristics to a population of interest. Currently, analysts use published information about vaccine efficacy (VE) as the probability that a vaccinated agent develops immunity; however, VE trials typically report only a single overall VE, or VE conditioned on one covariate (e.