On 2 to 3 December 2019, WHO convened the Global Vaccine Safety Summit in Geneva, Switzerland. The summit aimed to “take stock of [the] accomplishments” of WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS) and to work toward finalising the agency’s Global Vaccine Safety Blueprint 2.0 strategy 2021-2030.
On 28 November 2019, paediatrician Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’s Chief Scientist, assured the public in a commercial that “vaccines are very safe” and that vaccine safety tracking is robust, and examining the data lets them promptly address problems. They are “thoroughly monitored.”
Four days later, at the WHO Global
Vaccine Safety Summit, Dr. Swaminathan admitted: “We really don’t have
very good safety monitoring systems in many countries. We can’t give
answers about the deaths. We need to put mechanisms in place to monitor
what’s going on. With many drugs, we only learn about adverse events
after they are introduced to the populations.”...<<<Read More>>>...