A safe vaccine is the result of many good decisions. The entire process, from vaccine development to the actual giving of the vaccine, depends on quality information. Often such information is limited.

Everything we do at the Brighton Collaboration is for the purpose of providing vaccine stakeholders with the best possible information so they can make the best possible decisions. We focus our work on 5 areas:

1. Research standards
2. Clinical assessment
   
3. Data Linkage
   
4. Cpacity building
   
5. Communication

The lack of a common terminology and shared understanding of adverse events following immunization (AEFI) has caused much confusion among professionals and everyone considering to be immunized.

At the Brighton Collaboration, we provide investigators with up-to-date case definitions of AEFI, guidelines, and template protocols for their use to give public health decision makers the most accurate results available. Read more.

The results of well performed research tend to point in the same direction. However, trial sizes are limited and meta-analyses of the individual studies are challanging, if not impossible due to the diversity of methods employed and often the lack of a coordinated approach.

At the Brighton Collaboration we are pioneering collaborative vaccine safety studies across borders and promote collaborative studies, both ivestigating the safety of specific vaccines as well as evaluating the standards we have created. Read more.

Accurate vaccine product testing and monitoring requires high quality data of large populations. Ideally in the reage of 100 million. Technological advances and emerging methodologies allow linkage of databases of exposure ( i.e., vaccine) and outcome (i.e., disease) data.

At the Brighton Collaboration, we are have establishd the Brighton linkage program to conduct record linkage studies on a population of over 120 million people and we are building on the infrastructure and methodological framework we have initiated. Read more.

Now more than ever, it has become clear that safety of vaccines is not a local, but a global concern. As immunization systems mature, the safety of vaccines has become pivotal in determining the success or failure of national vaccine-preventable disease control programs.

At the Brighton Collaboration, we have joined forces with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build vaccine safety monitoring capacity in the world’s poorest countries. With the European Center of Disease Prevention Control (ECDC), we have developed pilot infrastructure for electronic record linkage and an online tool for automatic case classification. Over the last 10 years, we have built an active global network of vaccine safety professionals serving s a global vaccine safety resource. Read more.

Communication of the safety of vaccines is multifaceted and we are only starting to scratch the surface of learning how to communicate in plain language what is a highly complex subject. However, all communication is based on high quality source information, which is communicated well and in a timely fassion.

At the Brighton Collaboration, we have started to address this issue by establishing an online collaboration platform resembling a virtual research institute to faciliate and speed up communication between our members worlkdwide. We are engaging in translations, and planning to develop vaccine safety training programs for our members. We also  aim to establish onsultancy services for protocol development and independent study review boards. Read more.