Research priorities to increase vaccination coverage in Europe (EU joint action on vaccination)

Deciding how best to invest in healthcare is never an easy task and prioritization is therefore an area of great interest for policymakers. Too low public vaccine confidence, which results in insufficient vaccine uptake, remains an area of concern for EU policy-makers. Within the European Joint action on vaccination, a work-package dedicated to research aims to define tools and methods for priority-setting in the field of vaccination research. We therefore propose a prioritization framework to identify research priorities towards generating and synthesizing evidence to support policies and strategies aiming at increasing vaccine coverage.

We used a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method inspired by the Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative developed by Rudan et al. This quantitative methodology follows a series of steps involving different groups of experts and relevant stakeholders. The first step consists in identifying key research questions through a broad consultation. In parallel, a first group of experts is tasked to select criteria for prioritization of research questions, taking into consideration the ultimate goal of the exercise. Another group of experts is then requested to assess a weight to each of the criteria, using pair-wise comparisons. The final step consists in gathering experts who will assess each research question against the weighted criteria. This evaluation leads to assigning a score to each individual research question, which can then be ranked in order of priority.

We focused our work on four pre-selected pilot vaccines (pertussis, measles containing combination vaccines, influenza and HPV). The consultation generated 124 questions, which were secondarily sorted and re-worded to obtain 27 questions to be ranked. Criteria for setting priorities were the following: accessibility, answerability, deliverability, disease prevalence/incidence, effectiveness, equity, generalization, and territory. During a final face-to-face meeting international experts ranked the 27 questions and agreed on a consensual list of six top-priorities.

We have developed a transparent, evidence-based rigorous framework to defined key research questions to generate evidence towards the design of policies and strategies to increase vaccine coverage. Results were disseminated broadly and submitted to the EC for potential funding in the context of The Horizon Europe Program. The same process will be conducted in 2021 to identify vaccination research priorities regarding all vaccines used in the EU as well as COVID-19 vaccines.