Very few public health interventions have been as successful as immunizations to prevent ultimely deaths. Over the past thirty-five years, vaccines have provided substantial and highly cost-effective improvements to human health, and particularly to that of children. As immunization systems mature, immunization safety has become pivotal in determining the success or failure of national vaccine-preventable disease control programs.

Although, hundreds of million of doses of vaccine are used every year in developing countries, assessments of regulatory authorities conducted by WHO demonstrate that few of the developing countries programs have the ability to monitor and assure the safe use of vaccines.

Now more than ever, it is clear that vaccine safety issues are not merely a developing or developed country phenomenon, but a global phenomenon.

In the Brighton Collaboration, we joined forces with the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for building vaccine safety monitoring capacity in the world’s poorest countries. We are building a novel network to empower local experts to support each other and build capacity in their respective regions. This network will be increasingly more valuable as more vaccines get introduced in these populations first without the benefit of prior introduction and safety testing in other areas of the world.