Causal Vaccine Effects on Binary Postinfection Outcomes

TLDR: The results show that pertussis vaccination has a significant causal effect in reducing disease severity and the relations between the MLE of the causal estimand and two commonly used estimators for vaccine effects on postinfection outcomes are shown.

Abstract: The effects of vaccine on postinfection outcomes, such as disease, death, and secondary transmission to others, are important scientific and public health aspects of prophylactic vaccination. As a result, evaluation of many vaccine effects condition on being infected. Conditioning on an event that occurs posttreatment (in our case, infection subsequent to assignment to vaccine or control) can result in selection bias. Moreover, because the set of individuals who would become infected if vaccinated is likely not identical to the set of those who would become infected if given control, comparisons that condition on infection do not have a causal interpretation. In this article we consider identifiability and estimation of causal vaccine effects on binary postinfection outcomes. Using the principal stratification framework, we define a postinfection causal vaccine efficacy estimand in individuals who would be infected regardless of treatment assignment. The estimand is shown to be not identifiable under the standard assumptions of the stable unit treatment value, monotonicity, and independence of treatment assignment. Thus selection models are proposed that identify the causal estimand. Closed-form maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) are then derived under these models, including those assuming maximum possible levels of positive and negative selection bias. These results show the relations between the MLE of the causal estimand and two commonly used estimators for vaccine effects on postinfection outcomes. For example, the usual intent-to-treat estimator is shown to be an upper bound on the postinfection causal vaccine effect provided that the magnitude of protection against infection is not too large. The methods are used to evaluate postinfection vaccine effects in a clinical trial of a rotavirus vaccine candidate and in a field study of a pertussis vaccine. Our results show that pertussis vaccination has a significant causal effect in reducing disease severity.