Demographic Dependence of Vaccine Adoption under Opinion Persuasion
For policymakers and epidemiologists, it provides a control-theoretic framework for designing robust vaccination campaigns against misinformation targeting specific subgroups.
The paper develops an SIS-Vo model integrating opinion dynamics with epidemic spread to study how targeted policy interventions can stabilize vaccination adoption, demonstrating through simulations that demographic-specific messaging can move the system toward a disease-free equilibrium.
Inspired by contagion models of social belief formation, we develop an epistemically-informed modeling framework, SIS-Vo, in which vaccine-related information propagates on a signed opinion network. Our model allows for heterogeneous treatment effects of policy messages across subpopulations through demographic-specific responses. We derive fixed-point characterizations of the healthy (disease-free) and endemic equilibria of this model, and obtain conditions for local stability of the healthy state in terms of the contact network and opinion-dependent vaccination capacities. Using numerical simulations, we illustrate how suitably targeted policy interventions, acting through opinion dynamics, can stabilize the epidemic process by moving the system towards the healthy regime. The SIS-Vo framework thus provides a natural basis for control-theoretic analysis of vaccination policies that remain robust even when misinformation targets specific subgroups.