Around September 2000 (Fall) the Brighton Collaboration (BC) was officially launched, following a 1999 vaccine conference in Brighton, England, where US CDC’s Robert Chen and others called for “improving the quality of vaccine safety data”. [10]
Their initial stated mission “is an international voluntary collaboration to facilitate the development, evaluation, and dissemination of high quality information about the safety of human vaccines.” with a primary aim “[t]o develop globally accepted and implemented standardized case definitions of Adverse Events Following Immunization” (AEFI) i.e. vaccine injury.
“The Collaboration consists of researchers and other professionals from vaccine safety, public health, pharmaceutical and regulatory agencies to address the problems of the quality of information on vaccine safety. Its primary task is the harmonization and standardization of AEFI’s”. [3, 11]
The CDC and WHO got involved in the 2000 launch, and by 2001 the “Brighton Method for defining adverse events following immunization was established” and on May 22, 2002 they held their first International Symposium on the Evaluation of Safety of Human Vaccines. [1, 2]
In December 2003 the finalised formation of the Brighton Collaboration Foundation, was announced. It is a “independent, not-for-profit organization, under the direct supervision of the Swiss government. It can accept funding and responsibly create strategies that help donors and The Brighton Collaboration scientists achieve their common goals”. [5]
By 2004 the first scientific publications of the BC included the “first six case definitions of adverse events following immunisation”. Curiously in 2003 they had a working group looking at “Idiopathic Thrombocytopenia”. [Note in April 2021 Robert Chen, now the Scientific Director, and is defining Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS) [6]
In 2005 the United Nations recommends the “Brighton Collaboration case definitions and guidelines” and in 2007 they are recommended by the FDA then the EMA in 2008. [4]
In 2011 the BC partnered with the WHO to develop the Vaccine Safety Blueprint. In 2013 templates for documenting the safety of Viral Vector Vaccines were created, the same year the “Brighton Collaboration Online Journal Club formalised to promote open and transparent scientific debate of current issues in vaccine safety.”
On May 21, 2019 the Brighton Collaboration is dissolved as a partnership under Swiss law and reconstituted as a programme of the Task Force for Global Health, a not-for-profit NGO that began in 1984 [11, 12]. The Swiss Brighton Collaboration Foundation remains. BC now operate out of Atlanta, where they’ve always had an office, but it is claimed The move to the Task Force for Global Health is “to help increase efficiency and meet the increasing social demand for information about vaccine safety”. [7, 8, 9]
On May 28, 2019 CEPI in partner with the BC launched the Safety Platform for Emergency vACcines (SPEAC) Project to “help assess the safety of various CEPI-funded vaccine candidates undergoing clinical trials” – just in time for the COVID-19 vaccines.
In 2020 the “World Health Organization (WHO) Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS) recommended that “any review of the safety of new vaccines be based on the appropriate Brighton Collaboration standardized templates for benefit–risk assessment of vaccines (by technology platforms) when available and approved, which offer a structured approach to evaluating safety””,