VN058- SSA to support for monitoring AEFI (EPI vaccine, COVID-19 vaccine)

Background

National Expanded Program on Immunization (NEPI) has been one of long-standing health programs in Vietnam implementing free and basic vaccinations for young children to prevent dangerous and easily transmitted diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus, Hepatitis B, Hib, Measles, Rubella. WHO has provided support for immunization activities including routine immunization and campaign planning and implementation, technical guidelines developments, as well as VPDs surveillance as a back bone to provide evidence for immunization program planning and implementation. To maintain immunization activities as an essential health service including VPDs surveillances is critically important to detect any resurgence or epidemics and respond to such events especially of outbreak-prone VPDs such as measles during COVID-19.

Vietnam deployed a large COVID-19 vaccination campaign since Mar 2021. As of May 22, 2022, Vietnam has received a total of about 223 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines. Up to 9 June, 222,610,562 injections were administered nationwide, the coverage of dose 1 is 86,2%; dose 2 reached 79,3% of the total population. There are 68,8 million adults, 8,5 million children aged 12-17 and 0.67 million children aged 5-11 have been fully vaccinated the vaccine. The focus of next steps is to continue to reach the unreached population with primary dose, improving the coverage of booster dose, particularly for high-risk groups, improving the coverage of COVID-19 vaccination for children aged 5-11 and catching up children who missed routine vaccination in 2020-2021 that are the highest priorities.

The Department of Preventive Medicine is the central agency in charge of managing the use of vaccines nationwide, responsible for guiding the use of vaccines, immunization and monitoring of vaccination safety; performs the function of monitoring vaccination safety under the National Vaccine Administration (NRA) and permanent member of the Advisory Council on the use of vaccines of the Ministry of Health and AEFI causality assessment for professional advisory committee of the Ministry of Health. Especially COVID-19 vaccine, Ministry of Health Viet Nam have worked very closely with related agencies and contributed a lot for ensuring all ongoing works and missions of COVID-19 vaccine deployment.

The parallel implementation of dual goals must both make efforts to well implement routine immunization, maintain a high vaccination coverage for children and urgently deploy a vaccination campaign of COVID-19 for the whole population safely and effectively to respond to epidemic prevention is very difficult. In addition, human resources at the national level were also overloaded.

Therefore, WHO representative office of Viet Nam commences SSA to provide support to GDPM to well deploy COVD-19 vaccine strategies and to effectively coordinate supports by WHO in 2023.

Planned timelines

Start date 1 February 2023

End date: 31 December 2023

Address for application

Administrative Officer

World Health Organization

UN Building, 304 Kim Ma Street, Hanoi, Viet Nam

Or by email at:

wpvnmapplicants@who.int

Subject: Application for VN058- SSA to support for monitoring AEFI (EPI vaccine, COVID-19 vaccine)