With the ability to draw on data from over 250 million people, the Global Vaccine Data Network will investigate rare complications linked to COVID19 vaccines in hopes of improving prediction, treatment, and potentially prevention of these side effects.
Scientists in more than 20 countries, on every continent save Antarctica, have started to gather data for the largest ever vaccine safety project. Members of the effort, called the Global Vaccine Data Network , fruitlessly sought funding after conceiving the project more than 10 years ago. But the mass vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic breathed new life into the project.
Doing this research comes with steep scientific hurdles, among them the rarity of serious problems. The largest vaccine studies have included about 1 million people, and even that can be too small to nail down side effects.
Carleton and Daniel Salmon, a vaccine safety researcher at Johns Hopkins University, conjured up its first project: a study of the potential risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurologic condition, from flu vaccines. In early February 2020, just as COVID-19 was taking hold, they submitted a funding proposal to the National Institutes of Health , briefly noting that if a pandemic emerged and vaccines were developed, their network would be well-suited to studying any side effects.
Pulling the venture together has been “gnarly,” Petousis-Harris says. It’s meant middle-of-the-night conference calls across a dozen time zones, and months spent harmonizing the definition of a health condition, like myocarditis, across hospital systems and countries. Getting at the risk increase of complications after vaccination is also statistically complex.
For now, the new efforts don’t include difficult-to-diagnose health problems that may be linked to the vaccines.s, such as chronic headaches and irregular heart rate and blood pressure, soon after vaccination, but studying this phenomenon is far more difficult. Headaches, for instance, are so common that no vaccine surveillance system would detect an imbalance, says Rebecca Chandler, who works on vaccine safety at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
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