When writing about vaccines, especially new vaccines or new recommendations, it’s helpful to review the data and presentation slides that the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) also reviews at its meetings, which occur three times a year. While the meetings are publicly live-streamed, journalists can always go back to find the agendas and minutes of previous meetings as well as the slides from each meeting (click Meeting Materials on this page). For slides from meetings prior to the current year, journalists (or the general public) can email to request them at acip@cdc.gov. These slides are especially useful for finding the most up to date and synthesized data on effectiveness of flu vaccines and other new vaccines. Journalists can also wade into the weeds of how the committee members grade the evidence by accessing the Grade Evidence Tables and Evidence to Recommendations Frameworks here.
The most complete record of national and states rates of immunization coverage for each vaccine are in the National Immunization Surveys. Anyone can download the data sets in various forms for each of the most recent five years for which data is available. Adverse events occurring after vaccination are reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a passive surveillance system available for anyone (doctors, patients, parents, other health care providers, etc.) to report any adverse event that occurred after receiving a vaccine. However, because VAERS is a passive system – it only collects information, which anyone can submit as many times as they like – it does not accurately represent “side effects” that are linked to vaccines. (It is similar to MAUDE at the FDA.) Reports may be duplicates and may be coincidental or actual side effects from vaccines. (Some reports include car accidents, for example.) A YouTube training video explains how to search the VAERS database. Reports are available as CSV or ZIP files by year dating to 1990. An active surveillance system for vaccines is the Vaccine Safety Datalink. Research findings from the VSD are frequently published in medical studies (complete list here), and two datasets are available by public request.