Abstract
Zoonotic pathogens spread by wildlife continue to spill over into human populations and threaten human lives. A potential way to reduce this threat is by vaccinating wildlife species that harbor infectious diseases of humans. Unfortunately, even in cases where vaccines can be distributed en masse as edible baits, achieving levels of vaccine coverage sufficient for pathogen elimination is rare. Developing vaccines that self-disseminate may help solve this problem by magnifying the impact of limited direct vaccination. Although models now exist that quantify how well these self-disseminating vaccines will work when introduced into temporally stable wildlife populations, how well they will perform when introduced into populations with pronounced seasonal dynamics remains unknown. Here we develop and analyze mathematical models of fluctuating wildlife populations that allow us to study how reservoir ecology, vaccine design, and vaccine delivery interact to influence vaccine coverage and opportunities for pathogen elimination. Our results demonstrate that the timing of vaccine delivery can make or break the success of vaccination programs, and that the importance of timing is greater for some types of vaccines than others. As a general rule, the effectiveness of self-disseminating vaccines is optimized by introducing after the peak of seasonal reproduction when the number of susceptible animals is near its maximum.