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.