The importance of vaccine on public health is related to the herd protection related to the levels of vaccine coverage, which directly influences the vaccinated individuals as well as the unvaccinated community. Reaching the level of herd protection by increasing vaccine coverage is the basic strategy to eradicate related infectious diseases. Again, herd protection has played an important role in public health practices. With the increasing interests in estimating the vaccine herd protection, we however, have seen only few relevant papers including observational population-based and cluster-randomized clinical trials reported in China. We hope to discuss the study designs for evaluating the vaccine herd protection in order to generate evidence-based related research in this field.
疫苗的公共卫生意义在于疫苗的群体保护效应，即当疫苗接种率达到一定水平时，疫苗接种将会直接保护接种人群和间接保护未接种人群。扩大疫苗接种率达到足够的群体保护是预防甚至是根除某些传染性疾病的基本策略。此外，群体保护的评价在制定公共卫生策略方面具有十分重要的作用。近年来，国外关于疫苗群体保护的研究日益增多，包括人群观察性研究和群随机对照临床研究，但国内还未见相关的文献报道。本文旨在对评价疫苗群体保护的研究设计及方法进行阐述，为我国在该领域的相关研究提供参考。.
Keywords: Cluster-randomized clinical trial; Herd immunity; Herd protection; Observational study; Vaccine.