Vaccines are very safe.

If someone gets sick after vaccination, it is usually either a coincidence, an error in administering the vaccine,

or very rarely a problem with the vaccine itself.

That's why we have vaccine safety systems.

Robust vaccine safety systems allow health workers and experts to react immediately to any problems that may arise.

They can examine the problem, rigorously and scientifically look at the data and then promptly address the problem.

WHO works closely with countries to make sure that vaccines can do what they do best, prevent disease without risks.

New vaccines against malaria, meningitis and encephalitis in Asia and Africa are now being thoroughly monitored with support from WHO.

Vaccines are one of the safest tools we have to't have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries.

And this adds to the miscommunication and the misapprehensions because we're not able to give clear-cut answers.

When people ask questions about the deaths that have occurred due to particular vaccine,

and this always gets blown up in the media,

one should be able to give a very factual account of what exactly has happened and what the cause of deaths are.

But in most cases, there's some obfuscation at that level,

and therefore there's less and less trust then in the system. Putting in place the mechanisms,

whether they're cohort studies or whether there's sentinel surveillance sites, to be able to monitor

what's going on and report back and then for corrective action to be taken

because unexpected things could arise after introduction and one always has to be prepared

as we've seen you know the history of many drugs you've heard about I mean learned about adverse events only after the drugs being licensed and introduced into the population.

So I think that risk is always there and the population needs to understand that

and feel confident that mechanisms are being put in place to study some of those things.