By Dr Amy Rogers
VACCINES are a crucial part of the efforts to combat Covid-19 disease. Since the start of the pandemic, scientists worldwide have worked extremely hard, building on many years of experience and knowledge, to develop new vaccines.
All vaccines approved for use in the UK have been rigorously evaluated during development. However, making sure that new vaccines are effective and safe does not stop there. While the UK undertakes a vaccination programme of unprecedented scale, efforts are ongoing to ensure that the new vaccines maximally benefit the population with minimal risk of harm to individuals.
The Medicines Healthcare Regulatory Authority (MHRA) is responsible for weighing the benefits and risks of every vaccine they authorise for use in the UK. To do this, they review evidence from laboratory studies to clinical trials and beyond. The amount of information to be analysed is enormous, and experts are involved at every stage. Even after a new medicine or vaccine is authorised, regulators continue this process, assessing new evidence; this is vital to maintain public confidence in vaccination. Vaccine regulators need good data to support their decision making. We have designed the VAC4COVID study to produce high-quality and timely evidence to assist the MHRA in their decision making.
VAC4COVID is a UK-wide online study to monitor people’s health before and after Covid-19 vaccination using quick and straightforward web-based questionnaires. It will track if any of the new vaccines seem to be causing unexpected effects. VAC4COVID is currently recruiting adults in the UK, aged 18 years and over, to assist with this research.
New diagnoses or symptoms happen to people all the time, whether they are vaccinated or not. Some people will inevitably suffer unexpected new symptoms or be diagnosed with new conditions soon after vaccination. The vast majority of these will be coincidental, but it is natural to wonder if something might have been caused by vaccination. The only way to be sure of picking up real side effects, and not things that have happened simultaneously due to chance, is by doing large scientific studies, including data on many thousands of people.
The vast majority of people who are vaccinated will likely experience no symptoms or side effects. This information in itself is valuable as it strengthens the evidence that vaccination is safe. Some people will report mild expected side effects, such as feeling tired or feverish for a day or two; this will help us learn more about who is likely to get side effects and improve future vaccine education and communication. Should unexpected effects of vaccination occur, either good or bad, we must identify these early; there is little point in discovering these things after almost everyone has been vaccinated.
The UK vaccine programme has the potential to generate a tremendous amount of knowledge about these vaccines. This knowledge will be invaluable worldwide as vaccines are distributed and administered to the many millions of people who are still at risk from Covid-19 disease. By joining the study at www.vac4covid.com, you can help us learn more about Covid-19 vaccines and how we should use them to improve global health and wellbeing.
Dr Amy Rogers is Clinical Research Fellow, MEMO Research, University of Dundee
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