Pakistan and Brazil Data-Driven Ecosystem for COVID-19 Preparedness, Equity and Vaccine Surveillance

Haroon Hafeez of Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in Pakistan will develop a framework for the re-use of large clinical and administrative datasets to enable comparative analysis of COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness in Pakistan and in Brazil, with colleagues at Fiocruz there, to improve pandemic responses and promote data-driven evidence generation in the Global South. Monitoring vaccinations across different settings is crucial for containing pandemics. However, comparative analysis of large health datasets in different scenarios is challenging due to concerns around safety and reproducibility and the loss of the context in which the data was collected, which can affect research results. They will adapt data science standards and tools to different local health system scenarios and run individual and joint vaccine effectiveness analyses for the two countries to assess compatibility and reproducibility of the findings. They will also build a public data visualization dashboard for health managers and policymakers to monitor the pandemic, particularly in vulnerable populations.