#19 Lessons in pandemic pharmacovigilance – Elena Rocca

The COVID-19 pandemic forced pharmacovigilance experts to revisit
their processes to deal with unprecedented volumes of data and
catch unexpected safety issues. Elena Rocca from Oslo
Metropolitan University reviews the challenges of a global
healthcare emergency – and what it can teach us about the science
of drug safety.

Tune in to find out:


How to handle uncertain evidence

Why clinical expertise matters in the age of big data

Why pharmacovigilance requires interdisciplinary
thinking 



Want to know more?
In the article that inspired this episode, Elena Rocca
and Birgitta Grundmark describe the practical, conceptual, and
ethical challenges pharmacovigilance experts were faced with
during the pandemic.

See also this review by Annette Rudolph and colleagues at Uppsala
Monitoring Centre on the unique challenges of a global
vaccination campaign.

Elena’s reflections on big data pharmacovigilance and its ethical
implications were inspired by Sabina Leonelli’s work on big data
biology and mathematician Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math
Destruction.

The CauseHealth Pharmacovigilance project, a collaboration
between UMC and the NMBU Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science
in Norway, ran between 2018 and 2021.

For more philosophical inspiration, revisit this interview with
Eugene van Puijenbroek on intuition in pharmacovigilance or this
Uppsala Reports Long Read on new approaches to causality.





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