The pharmaceutical industry must be prepared for the coming wave of COVID-related safety reports.
The pharmaceutical industry has made COVID-19 treatments and vaccines available with unprecedented—and inspiring—speed.Although this is cause for celebration from a public health perspective, the deployment of these new products will also bring a significant new challenge for all manufacturers: an unprecedented increase in the number of safety reports that could potentially accompany the use of these new products.It is easy to imagine how this will be the case for manufacturers of products specifically for COVID-19 given they are deployed with record speed. However, manufacturers of many other products also are likely to see a significant influx of safety reports, as the new medicines and vaccines may interact with existing diseases and medicines in unforeseen ways. Therefore, it is imperative that safety teams across all companies prepare for increased demands on pharmacovigilance and risk management systems across their portfolios.
