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The Department of Health (DH) has put in place a pharmacovigilance system to monitor the safety of registered pharmaceutical products supplied in Hong Kong. The pharmacovigilance system includes an adverse drug reaction (ADR) reporting platform, which also receives adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) reports related to vaccination, including COVID-19 vaccination.
If you have any suspected adverse event occurred after immunization, please alert healthcare professionals (e.g. doctors, dentists, pharmacists, nurses and Chinese medicine practitioners), when seeking their advice, to report the AEFIs to the DH if they considered that the AEFIs may be associated with the vaccination.
The main purpose of the pharmacovigilance system is to detect potential signals of possible side effects of the vaccines. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an AEFI is any medical occurrence that follows immunisation and that does not necessarily have a causal relationship with the usage of the vaccine.
To monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use under Cap. 599K, the DH has set up the Expert Committee on Clinical Events Assessment Following COVID-19 Immunisation (“Expert Committee”) to provide independent assessment on the potential causality between AEFIs and COVID-19 vaccination.
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