GOV’T UNIT LOOKING INTO US VACCINE SAFETY SCUTTLED LAST YEAR

The Trump administration quietly disbanded the National Vaccine Program Office (NVPO) last year, thus abolishing a unit that has expertise on vaccine safety and merging it into an office focused on infectious diseases. 

Its elimination has left that long-term safety effort for coronavirus vaccines fragmented among federal agencies, with no central leadership, experts say, Carl Zimmer wrote for the New York Times.

“We’re behind the eight ball,” said Daniel Salmon, who served as the director of vaccine safety in that office from 2007 to 2012, overseeing coordination during the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009. ”We don’t even know who’s in charge.” A Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson said that the vaccine office was not shuttered. “The office was not ‘closed,’ but was merged with the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy and was strengthened,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “All the functions continue in this new organizational structure.” 

Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have decades of experience tracking the long-term safety of vaccines. They’ve created powerful computer programs that can analyze large databases. “It’s like satellites looking at the weather,” said Dr. Bruce Gellin, the president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, who headed the NVPO from 2002 to 2017. But monitoring hundreds of millions of Americans who may get different coronavirus vaccines from a variety of drug makers by summer is like tracking a major storm beyond anything researchers have dealt with before.