The impact of local vaccine coverage and recent incidence on measles transmission in France between 2009 and 2018

BACKGROUND: Subnational heterogeneity in immunity to measles can create pockets of susceptibility and result in long-lasting outbreaks despite high levels of national vaccine coverage. The elimination status defined by the World Health Organization aims to identify countries where the virus is no longer circulating and can be verified after 36 months of interrupted transmission. However, since 2018, numerous countries have lost their elimination status soon after reaching it, showing that the indicators defining elimination may not be associated with lower risks of outbreaks. METHODS: We quantified the impact of local vaccine coverage and recent levels of incidence on the dynamics of measles in each French department between 2009 and 2018, using mathematical models based on the “Endemic-Epidemic” regression framework. After fitting the models using daily case counts, we simulated the effect of variations in the vaccine coverage and recent incidence on future transmission. RESULTS: High values of local vaccine coverage were associated with fewer imported cases and lower risks of local transmissions, but regions that had recently reported high levels of incidence were also at a lower risk of local transmission. This may be due to additional immunity accumulated during recent outbreaks. Therefore, the risk of local transmission was not lower in areas fulfilling the elimination criteria. A decrease of 3% in the 3-year average vaccine uptake led to a fivefold increase in the average annual number of cases in simulated outbreaks. CONCLUSIONS: Local vaccine uptake was a reliable indicator of the intensity of transmission in France, even if it only describes yearly coverage in a given age group, and ignores population movements. Therefore, spatiotemporal variations in vaccine coverage, caused by disruptions in routine immunisation programmes, or lower trust in vaccines, can lead to large increases in both local and cross-regional transmission. The incidence indicator used to define the elimination status was not associated with a lower number of local transmissions in France, and may not illustrate the risks of imminent outbreaks. More detailed models of local immunity levels or subnational seroprevalence studies may yield better estimates of local risk of measles outbreaks. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12916-022-02277-5.