Vaccine effectiveness
Evaluating vaccine effectiveness (VE) is critical for understanding the risks and benefits of vaccination programmes. Many factors impact real-world VE, including vaccine transportation and storage and how patients are vaccinated. In addition, types of populations included in vaccine clinical trials are limited, and different from those who will receive vaccines in the real world.
Real-world VE studies can also answer questions about effectiveness by age group and risk factors, duration of vaccine protection, protection against transmission, relative effectiveness of different vaccines, relative effectiveness of various numbers of doses and their timings, and effectiveness of the vaccine against new variants, in terms of SARS-CoV-2.
ECDC works to coordinate or support independent, post-marketing monitoring studies of effectiveness and safety of vaccines, and shall collect new information, use the relevant data collected by independent bodies, or both.
ECDC implements vaccine effectiveness (VE) studies with a focus on a multi-country approach and sustained infrastructure over time.
Latest VEBIS study results:
Latest VEBIS study protocols:
The Vaccine Monitoring Platform (VMP) is a joint collaboration between the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) aiming to generate real-word evidence (RWE) on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA).
The aim of this collaboration is to develop an EU/EEA-wide system for the exchange of existing and new scientific evidence and the joint generation of up-to-date scientific evidence, if possible in systematic literature reviews using evidence-based methodology, on public health outcomes on vaccines authorised in the EU and their use in immunisation programmes.
ECDC performed a prioritisation exercise on vaccination research topics and questions with the ECDC EU/EEA NITAG Collaboration Members in 2022.
Following this exercise, four systematic review questions were selected with ECDC EU/EEA NITAG Collaboration nominated working groups.