Nina Masters

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Epidemiology

Mathematical models have come to play a key role in global pandemic preparedness and outbreak response: helping to plan for disease burden, hospital capacity, and inform non-pharmaceutical interventions. Such models have played a pivotal role in the COVID-19 pandemic, with transmission models and, by consequence, modelers guiding global, national,...

Objectives: Vaccine hesitancy is a growing threat to health in the United States. Facing the fourth highest vaccine exemption rate in the United States in 2014, Michigan changed its state Administrative Rules, effective January 1, 2015, requiring parents to attend an in-person vaccine education session at their local health department before obtai...

The arrival of the COVID-19 vaccine has been accompanied by increased discussion of vaccine hesitancy. However, it is unclear if there are shared patterns between general vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 vaccine rejection, or if these are two different concepts. This study characterized rejection of a hypothetical COVID-19 vaccine, and compared patte...

Most research on vaccine hesitancy has focused on parental attitudes toward childhood vaccination, but it will be important to understand dimensions of vaccine hesitancy in the adult population as more adult vaccines are introduced in the future. We modified the Vaccine Hesitancy Scale to target adult vaccines and provide measures of its reliabilit...

Since the introduction of the highly effective measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine in 1971, measles incidence has decreased by over 95% globally. In 2012, the Measles and Rubella Initiative set to eliminate measles in five WHO regions by 2020. However, a recent global resurgence of measles amid rising levels of vaccine hesitancy threatens eliminati...

Michigan experienced a significant measles outbreak in 2019 amidst rising rates of non-medical vaccine exemptions (NMEs) and low vaccination coverage compared with the rest of the United States. There is a critical need to better understand the landscape of non-vaccination in Michigan to assess the risk of vaccine-preventable outbreaks in the state...

Background As of November 1, 2020, there have been more than 230K deaths and 9M confirmed and probable cases attributable to SARS-CoV-2 in the United States. However, this overwhelming toll has not been distributed equally, with geographic, race-ethnic, age, and socioeconomic disparities in exposure and mortality defining features of the U.S. COVID...

The United States experienced historically high numbers of measles cases in 2019, despite achieving national measles vaccination rates above the World Health Organization recommendation of 95% coverage with two doses. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, resulting in suspension of many clinical preventive services, pediatric vaccination rates in the...

Data from infectious disease outbreaks in congregate settings are often used to elicit clues about which types of interventions may be useful in other facilities. This is commonly done using before-and-after comparisons in which the infectiousness of pre-intervention cases is compared to that of post-intervention cases and the difference is attribu...

The United States experienced historically high numbers of measles cases in 2019, despite achieving national measles vaccination rates above the World Health Organization recommendation of 95% coverage with two doses. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began , resulting in suspension of many clinical preventive services, pediatric vaccination rates in the...

In order to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2, much of the US was placed under social distancing guidelines during March 2020. We characterized risk perceptions and adherence to social distancing recommendations in March 2020 among US adults aged 18+ in an online survey with age and gender quotas to match the general US population (N = 713). We used...

Background. As of August 5, 2020, there were more than 4.8M confirmed and probable cases and 159K deaths attributable to SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, with these numbers undoubtedly reflecting a significant underestimate of the true toll. Geographic, racial-ethnic, age and socioeconomic disparities in exposure and mortality are key features of t...

Background Although global progress in measles control has been realized, achieving elimination has proven difficult in many regions of the world. China has adopted a goal of measles elimination but recent outbreaks predominantly affecting children <8 months who are ineligible for vaccination and incompletely protected by maternal antibodies has im...

Vaccine hesitancy is a continuum of behaviors ranging from delay in receipt to vaccination refusal. Prior studies have typically focused on high-income countries, where vaccine hesitancy is particularly prevalent in more affluent groups, but the relationship between socioeconomic status and vaccine hesitancy in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMI...

Background: Traditional measurements of vaccine coverage at specific ages can mask poor vaccine timeliness. However, optimal measurement of timing is unclear due to variations in countries’ recommended vaccination schedules and lack of a commonly accepted standard for “timeliness”. We conducted a systematic review of literature on vaccine timelines...

Despite increasing global measles vaccination coverage, progress toward measles elimination has slowed in recent years. In China, children receive a measles-containing vaccine (MCV)at 8 months, 18–24 months, and some urban areas offer a third dose at age 4–6 years. However, substantial measles cases in Tianjin, China, occur among individuals who ha...

Objectives Kenya has a significant refugee population, including large numbers of Somali migrants. This study examines the vaccination status of Kenyan children and sociodemographic predictors of vaccination, including Somali ethnicity. Methods Using the 2014 Kenyan Demographic and Health Survey, we calculated the proportion of non-vaccinated, und...

Purpose of review: Waterborne enteric pathogens remain a global health threat. Increasingly, quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) and infectious disease transmission modeling (IDTM) are used to assess waterborne pathogen risks and evaluate mitigation. These modeling efforts, however, have largely been conducted independently for different...

Introduction: Vaccines are vital to reducing childhood mortality, and prevent an estimated 2 to 3 million deaths annually which disproportionately occur in the developing world. Overall vaccine coverage is typically used as a metric to evaluate the adequacy of vaccine program performance, though it does not account for untimely administration, whic...

Objectives India has more unvaccinated children than any other country despite provision of free vaccines through the government’s Universal Immunization Program. In this study, we calculated the proportion of children aged 12–48 months who were fully vaccinated, under-vaccinated, or who had not received any vaccines. Childhood, household, and soci...

The development of methods for achieving precise spatiotemporal control over chemical and biomolecular gradients could enable significant advances in areas such as synthetic tissue engineering, biotic-abiotic interfaces, and bionanotechnology. Living organisms guide tissue development through highly orchestrated gradients of biomolecules that direc...