Vaccine Safety Datalink

The Vaccine Safety Datalink Project (VSD) was established in 1990 by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to study the adverse side effects of vaccines.

Four large health maintenance organizations, including Kaiser Permanente, were initially recruited to provide the CDC with medical data on vaccination histories, health outcomes, and subject characteristics. The VSD database contains data compiled from surveillance on more than seven million Americans, including about 500,000 children from birth through age six years (2% of the U.S. population in this age group).

The VSD data-sharing program is now being administered by the National Center for Health Statistics Research Data Center. The data sharing guidelines have been revised to include comments from interested groups as well as recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

Data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink Project have been utilized to address a number of vaccine safety concerns; examples include a study clarifying the risk of anaphylaxis after vaccine administration and several studies finding no link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism.