COVID-19 Vaccine Update: Safety, Immunity and Variants

Summary: We will review current safety data from use of COVID-19 vaccines, and highlight ongoing safety surveillance and research in BC and across Canada. Immune responses to COVID-19 vaccines will be discussed and implications for vaccine effectiveness. We will discuss Understanding how variants of SARS-V-2 can affect vaccine effectiveness. Presenters: Dr. Manish Sadarangani is Director of the Vaccine Evaluation Center at the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute and an Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases, UBC Department of Pediatrics. He has worked in pediatrics throughout the world, including in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Australia, North America and Europe. His research links clinical trials with basic microbiology, immunology and epidemiology to address clinically relevant problems related to immunization and vaccine-preventable diseases. Dr. Julie Bettinger, PhD, MPH, is a Professor at the Vaccine Evaluation Center in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of British Columbia. She is an infectious disease epidemiologist whose research interests include vaccine safety and vaccine preventable diseases, as well as attitudes and beliefs around immunization uptake and use. She is the data center director for the Canadian Immunization Monitoring Program, Active (IMPACT), an active surveillance network for vaccine preventable diseases and vaccine adverse events in 12 tertiary care pediatric hospitals across Canada and the principal investigator for CIRN’s Canadian National Vaccine Safety (CANVAS) network, which monitors the safety of influenza vaccines each year and is monitoring COVID vaccines. Dr. Agatha Jassem, PhD, D(ABMM), FCCM, is a Clinical Microbiologist and the Program Head of the Virology/Molecular Diagnostics Lab at the BC Centre for Disease Control Public Health Laboratory. She is also a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at UBC. Dr. Jassem oversees diagnostic testing and her research focuses on evaluating new molecular- and serology-based strategies for virus detection/exposure.

BC CDC Presenters

4/27/2021 7:00:00 PM