Global vaccine safety blueprint - landscape analysis
Overview
Very few public-health interventions have been as successful as immunizations in preventing untimely deaths. Over the past thirty-five years, vaccines have provided substantial and highly cost-effective improvements to human health, particularly to that of children. As immunization systems mature, immunization safety has become pivotal in determining the success or failure of national vaccine-preventable disease control programmes.
Although hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine are used every year in developing countries, assessments of regulatory authorities, conducted by WHO, demonstrate that few of the developing countries’ programmes have the ability to monitor and assure the safe use of vaccines. Now more than ever, it is clear that vaccine safety issues are not merely a developing or developed country phenomenon, but a global phenomenon. WHO has therefore proposed developing a blueprint for a global, regional and country level vaccine safety assessment and response system.