Peer Review #3 of "Evaluation of the effect of chickenpox vaccination on shingles epidemiology using agent-based modeling (v0.3)"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background.Biological interactions between varicella (chickenpox) and herpes zoster (shingles), two diseases caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), continue to be debated including the potential effect on shingles cases following the introduction of universal childhood chickenpox vaccination programs.We investigated how chickenpox vaccination in Alberta impacts the incidence and age-distribution of shingles over 75 years postvaccination taking into consideration a variety of plausible theories of waning and boosting of immunity.Methods.We developed an agent-based model representing VZV disease, transmission, vaccination states and coverage, waning and boosting of immunity in a stylized geographic area, utilizing a distance-based network.We derived parameters from literature, including modeling, epidemiological, and immunology studies.We calibrated our model to the age-specific incidence of shingles and chickenpox prior to vaccination to derive optimal combinations of duration of boosting and waning of immunity.We conducted paired simulations with and without implementing chickenpox vaccination.We computed the count and cumulative incidence rate of shingles cases at 10, 25, 50 and 75 years intervals, following introduction of vaccination, and compared the difference between runs with vaccination and without vaccination using Mann-Whitney U-test to determine statistical significance.We carried out sensitivity analyses by increasing and lowering vaccination coverage and removing biological effect of boosting.Results.Chickenpox vaccination led to a decrease in chickenpox cases.The cumulative incidence of chickenpox had dropped from 1,254 cases per 100,000 person-years pre-chickenpoxvaccination to 193 cases per 100,000 person-years 10 years after the vaccine implementation.We observed an increase in the all-ages shingles cumulative incidence at 10 and 25 years post chickenpox vaccination and mixed cumulative incidence change at 50 and 75 years post-vaccination.The magnitude of change was sensitive to duration of boosting and ranged from an increase of 22 to 100 per 100,000 person-years at 10 years
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.130 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.251 | 0.087 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".