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Institute for Vaccine Safety

The Institute for Vaccine Safety was established in 1997 in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health - now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our mission is to provide an independent assessment of vaccines and vaccine safety to help guide decision makers and educate physicians, the public and the media about key issues surrounding the safety of vaccines. The institute’s goal is to work toward preventing disease using the safest vaccines possible.


What's New on the IVS Website

  • COVID-19 Information consolidated:
  • Shingrix and GBS. A recent self-controlled study found an association between recombinant zoster vaccination (RZV), also known as Shingrix, and Guillain Barré Syndrome (GBS) among persons age 65 and older in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) database. The rate ratio, comparing cases in risk versus control windows, was 4.30 (95% Confidence Interval: 1.76-10.53); this corresponds to an attributable risk of 6.47 additional cases of GBS per million doses of Shingrix (95%CI: 2.47-10.47). However, these results should be interpreted with caution, as the number of cases in the study was small (13 in risk window versus 8 in control window), and the study is not yet peer reviewed. link to slides from Feb 21 ACIP Meeting
  • IVS in the News link
  • The state of vaccine safety science: systematic review of the evidence. Dudley, et al (including other IVS faculty) update evidence assessing possible causal association of AEFIs.  Link to abstract
  • Prevent Shoulder Injury Associated with Vaccination (SIRVA)
    DO NOT try to identify the middle of the deltoid by using a fingerbreadth measurement from the acromion process. DO use the Australian method for identifying the middle of the deltoid injection site. Link to page
The information on this page was last updated on March 2, 2022 | © 2022 Institute for Vaccine Safety