Using Vaccine Safety Data to Demonstrate the Potential of Pooled Data Analysis

In Canada, vaccine safety studies are often conducted at the provincial/territorial level where the primary data on vaccination reside. Combining health services data from multiple jurisdictions using a pooled data analytic approach would reduce the amount of time needed to detect vaccine safety signals. To determine the difference in the time it would take to identify safety signals using different proportions of the Canadian population, we conducted power and sample size calculations for a hypothetical self-controlled case series-based surveillance analysis. We used scenarios modeled after the real-world examples of myocarditis and vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT) following COVID-19 vaccination as our base cases. Our calculations demonstrated that in the case of a myocarditis-type event, a pooled analysis would reduce the time needed to detect a safety signal by over 60% compared to using Ontario data alone. In the case of a VITT-type event, a pooled analysis could detect a safety signal 49 days sooner than using Ontario data alone, potentially averting as many as 30 events. Our analysis demonstrates that there is substantial value in using pan-Canadian health services data to evaluate the safety of vaccines. Efforts should be made to develop a pan-Canadian vaccine data source to allow for an earlier evaluation of suspected adverse events following immunization.