Background

The recent GRAM/IHME report of Jan 2022 provides compelling global evidence that in 2019, the number of deaths directly attributable to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) was 1.27 million—greater than that of malaria or HIV.

At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the power and need of vaccines. The WHO recently released an action framework to make a case for the role of vaccines in mitigating AMR. Vaccines have the potential to not only provide the direct benefit of decreasing the burden of infectious diseases and circulating pathogens, but also to reduce the inappropriate use of antibiotics and in turn the evolution and transmission of AMR.

However, while pediatric vaccines have been a continuing and high priority for LMICs, their role in mitigating AMR has been less discussed within the AMR policy discourse until very recently. Most discussions have been around promising modelled data and scenarios, which now need to be urgently evaluated with ‘real-world data’ in ‘real-world settings.’

The past decade has seen the accelerated introduction of several pediatric vaccines in the National Immunization Programs (NIPs) of various LMICs in Africa and Asia, including Hib conjugate vaccine (Pentavalent), Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV), Rotavirus Vaccine (RVV) and, more recently, the Typhoid conjugate vaccine (TCV). While the direct benefits of these vaccines in preventing the targeted infectious diseases are valuable, the added benefit they bring in preventing the evolution and transmission of AMR is less studied or understood. Even within the larger global AMR community, the discourse on vaccines and AMR needs more grounded evidence rather than predictive modelling studies which have recently been published for some vaccines.

This webinar aims to build on the existing collaboration between IVI, the Republic of Korea and ICARS, Denmark. The purpose of this online seminar is to further expand this partnership to enable greater convergence between the vaccines and the AMR agenda—in both policy and practice within low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The webinar is expected to catalyze wider policy and technical dialogues to scope out the added value of vaccines to support LMICs effort to tackle AMR and advance NAP implementation. Input will be sought from a range of stakeholders including those involved in NIPs, national action plans on AMR, as well as infectious disease experts, researchers working on clinical development of vaccines and implementation research, civil society, pharmaceutical innovators, and industry.

[1] https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/global-burden-bacterial-antimicrobial-resistance-2019-systematic-analysis

[2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn1900

[3] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/leveraging-vaccines-to-reduce-antibiotic-use-and-prevent-antimicrobial-resistance#:~:text=WHO%20has%20developed%20a%20strategy,antimicrobial%20resistance%20by%20preventing%20infections

[4] https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/5/e005032

[5] https://cddep.org/projects/arvac-consortium/#:~:text=Vaccines%20can%20reduce%20AMR%20via,pathogenic%20strains%20(Figure%201).

[6] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fitd.2022.805833/full