The vaccine adverse event reporting system and vaccine safety research in the genomics era

Advances in genetics hold promise for integrating genomics into vaccine safety research. Given the rarity of many vaccine adverse effects, and the challenges in finding sufficient numbers of patients to study, consideration should be given to employing the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) for genetic studies of vaccine adverse events. VAERS could be used to build a repository of biospecimens allowing for the systematic evaluation of vaccine adverse events. If successful, such research would enable the identification of specific subgroups of people at particularly increased risk for adverse events.