VSWG
Back to the vaccine safety battle…
I was back in Washington, DC again last week focusing on my vaccine safety work. The quarterly meeting of the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines (ACCV) was held on June 4-5 in Rockville, Maryland. My term on this commission was supposed to only be three years, but that mark has come and gone and my replacement has not yet been named, so as long as I am the official consumer representative I will continue my efforts.
I often refer to my work on vaccine safety as a battle and I believe that is a fair term. There are definitely very strong divisions amongst the stakeholders and although we can find common ground it’s probably fair to say our differences far outweigh our agreements. So, in the arena that I participate it is a polite battle or a negotiation, if you will. I always tell my husband that I will do this work as long as I feel like I am effective, I am making a noticeable difference in progressing the safety of vaccines, and that I am not wasting my time, my family’s time or my family’s resources. I’m sure it’s not surprising that I assess these criteria frequently.
For the past year the major focus of my work has been on the Vaccine Safety Work Group (VSWG) for the National Vaccine Advisory Commission (NVAC). This work group has been asked to write a two-part White Paper that focuses on the issue of vaccine safety. I won’t bore you with the details of our work…if you are interested in what we have done thus far you can check out our recommendations for the first half of our task on the NVAC website. But, what I do want to share is that I have spent countless hours in the past year on this project…most of this time is unpaid, volunteer work. As a work group we only make recommendations to the committee that we report to and then hope that they will accept our work, pass our recommendations, and then move them to the Assistant Secretary for Health and Human ASHH) Services. Our VSWG recommendations included language that we really labored over, and included issues that really push the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to take a serious look at the issue of vaccine safety.
On June 2 the NVAC voted unanimously to accept our recommendations. It was really exciting to see that our work held up with minimal change will be moved on as recommendations to the ASHH. It told me that I did not waste an entire year of my life, time away from my family, and even personal financial expense to do this work. Perhaps the pieces of the work that mean the most to me will not hold up beyond this process….that is a very real risk. But, it held up far enough into the process to make a difference. It becomes public record. It will become part of a correspondence with decision makers at the CDC. It will become part of the historic record. That is why I do this work. And that is why I will continue to do it for a while longer.
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National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC)
