One of The Task Force’s programs took center stage this year with the public’s growing interest in vaccine development. Our Brighton Collaboration, the largest global organization of scientific experts on vaccine safety, a network of more than 850 people, assesses the safety of vaccine candidates for emerging infectious diseases. With the onset of COVID-19, the team pivoted current vaccine safety assessments to COVID-19 vaccine development, providing safety assessment tools for vaccine developers to use and monitor safety results during clinical trials.
At one point, there were approximately 300 vaccine candidates in various stages of development, a situation Brighton Collaboration Director Robert Chen, MD, called unprecedented given the scale and the speed of the effort.