About

This is the first draft of a shallow investigation report commissioned by Open Philanthropy. If you have access to it, I’ll be very grateful for comments and suggestions, which you can make directly in this doc.

This is a public document (although I have not posted it anywhere) and you’re welcome to cite it.

The purpose of this doc is to serve as a general introduction of the topic of optimal dosing/schedules of vaccines. It is not a research proposal or a policy document, but rather a tool for those who are exploring this as a cause area.

It is structured as follows: first, I start with a short overview: what it sets out to do and why, what I’ve learned, and what my tentative recommendations are. I tried to keep the executive summary very non-technical.

I then flesh out the factual claims and analysis throughout this document in a dozen separate chapters. I wrote each of them as a separate note, so you can read them as needed and in no particular order. In fact, the chapters were written in parallel and only merged afterwatds. I aimed to keep each chapter to 3,000 words.

I am very grateful to Open Philanthropy for commissioning this investigation. It's been a fantastic experience to set aside enough time to finally read and write about this topic, as well as to interview experts. On a more meta level, I discovered over and over that optimisation (especially of dose) is really understudied relative to other topics in vaccines.

Special thanks to my research assistants Danny Toomey and Josh Muthu, who helped on case studies and some of the early chapters. I am not naming any of my interviewees in this first draft, as I have not sought their approval or comments on this text, but most of the good ideas in this report come from them.

Lastly, an important statement of ignorance: in case you’re not familiar with my work, my academic background is in statistics and infectious disease modelling. I thought it important for this report to look at the optimisation issue holistically, all the way from biology to decision making. However, I am not an immunologist or a clinical researcher or a public health expert and I do not want to claim expertise on these topics. I am very thankful for all corrections.

Witold Więcek

June 2024