A review of methodologic & data considerations for vaccine safety surveillance in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Publication date: Sep 05, 2025

Vaccine safety surveillance systems are vital for the post-market safety monitoring of novel and well-established vaccines, given the sample size, representativeness and follow-up time in clinical trials. The introduction of COVID-19 vaccines during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic presented unprecedented challenges for safety surveillance. Here, we discuss methodologic considerations for epidemiologic study design and real world data for passive and active surveillance systems for COVID-19 vaccines in the United States (U. S.) and Europe, including standardized case definitions, quality of clinical reports, validity of coding algorithms, risk window misclassification, sample size considerations to detect safety signals within subgroups, time to signal identification, counterfactual including comparator selection, and confounding control in the context of a global pandemic. Throughout, we discuss techniques that may be applicable in vaccine surveillance activities, particularly those that occur within a global pandemic with rapid development and implementation of new vaccines to large portions of the population.

Semantics

Original Article