Effective safety monitoring of COVID-19 vaccines must go beyond the use of passive surveillance, which is typically used to monitor vaccine safety and generate a hypothesis, to the use of active surveillance that systematically collects more complete data that can support hypothesis testing as well. DIVaS’s aim is to develop a standardized protocol for the conduct of cohort event monitoring (CEM) among healthcare workers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to answer the question “What observed adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) are attributable to the COVID-19 vaccines?
DIVaS is currently working to create a standardized cohort event monitoring protocol to systematically collect information on short- and long-term adverse events following immunization (AEFI) from 50,000 healthcare workers (HCWs) receiving a COVID-19 vaccine in at least five developing countries using mobile phones. This will be complementary to other CEM studies to be supported by the WHO in other countries.
