New monitoring platform is more quickly and accurately addressing vaccine safety concerns
A new population-level vaccine safety monitoring tool that helps address vaccine safety concerns has been developed by epidemiologists at the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and the Royal Children’s Hospital.
The platform has already been used to support several vaccine safety investigations.
Vaccines help prevent over four million deaths worldwide each year, however community concerns regarding safety can lower vaccine uptake. Standard vaccine safety surveillance mechanisms involve the reporting of adverse events through an online portal, however reporting rates vary based on age, education level, and whether an individual speaks English as their first language.
The Vaccine Safety Health Link compliments this method by providing epidemiologists with anonymised routine health data from patients across Victoria, which includes data about their recent vaccinations. The large sample size enables researchers to quicky and accurately evaluate vaccine safety concerns.
The platform has been used for several investigations, including one in which researchers helped to alleviate concerns from a community member who was worried that their daughter’s appendicitis could be related to a recent vaccination. It has also supported international studies run by the United States Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Professor Jim Buttery and his team will continue to use the Vaccine Safety Health Link – the largest dataset of its kind in the southern hemisphere – to investigate all vaccine safety concerns raised by the Australian public.