VAC4EU Celebrating 5 years

In 2009, a new strain of influenza A, H1N1, began to spread across the world, reaching pandemic status in mere months. Widespread vaccination was necessary. As vaccine rollout progressed, experts from regulatory agencies, vaccine manufacturing companies, public health institutes, universities, and other stakeholder groups began to call for the creation of an ecosystem for the rapid and robust monitoring of vaccine coverage, benefits, and risks to prepare for future pandemics.

IMI project ADVANCE was a public-private partnership with the primary objective of creating such an ecosystem. Among many other outputs, the ADVANCE consortium produced a robust code of conduct and governance for conducting collaborative vaccine studies on coverage, effectiveness, safety and benefit-risk. The project concluded in April of 2019. Eight months later the Vaccine Monitoring Collaboration for Europe (VAC4EU) was signed into existence as a non-profit international association as a sustainability solution to ADVANCE. The mission of VAC4EU was to continue this valuable work, just in time for another pandemic…

Since then, while simultaneously evaluating the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, VAC4EU has been focused on maintaining and growing the infrastructure of readiness established during ADVANCE. What are some of the major achievements in readiness during the 5 years of VAC4EU's existence? What are the most valuable lessons learned in RWE readiness from the COVID-19 pandemic? How can we best continue to support vaccination programs with rapid data generation? How can this infrastructure be implemented in other contexts? What can we do to prepare for the next pandemic?