Recombinant transmissible vaccines will be intrinsically contained despite the ability to superinfect.

Introduction: Transmissible vaccines offer a novel approach to suppressing viruses in wildlife populations, with possible applications against viruses that infect humans as zoonoses - Lassa, Ebola, rabies. To ensure safety, current designs propose a recombinant vector platform in which the vector is isolated from the target wildlife population. Because using an endemic vector creates the potential for preexisting immunity to block vaccine transmission, these designs focus on vector viruses capable of superinfection, spreading throughout the host population following vaccination of few individuals.

Areas covered: We present original theoretical arguments that, regardless of its R₀ value, a recombinant vaccine using a superinfecting vector is not expected to expand its active infection coverage when released into a wildlife population that already carries the vector. However, if superinfection occurs at a high rate such that individuals are repeatedly infected throughout their lives, the immunity footprint in the population can be high despite a low incidence of active vaccine infections. Yet we provide reasons that the above expectation is optimistic.

Expert opinion: High vaccine coverage will typically require repeated releases or release into a population lacking the vector, but careful attention to vector choice and vaccine engineering should also help improve transmissible vaccine utility.