Helen Petousis Harris

Dr Helen Petousis-Harris blogs about vaccines and vaccination. Her background is predominantly biological sciences, and she did her PhD in Vaccinology, specifically around vaccine reactions. She worked at the Immunisation Advisory Centre at the University of Auckland between 1998 and 2018 where she has developed a passion for all things vaccine. Currently Helen has an appointment as an associate professor in the Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care and her teaching is largely around vaccination. Her research focuses on a number of aspects of vaccines and vaccination but in particular vaccine effectiveness and vaccine safety. She was previously the chair of the World Health Organization Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS). Of course all opinions in this blog are her own. Disclosures: Helen has led a number of industry funded studies. These have all been investigator conceived and led. She does not receive honorarium from industry personally. She has received industry support to attend some conferences and has contributed to Expert Advisory meetings for GSK, Merck, and Pfizer. Helen is a member of the Covid vaccine Science and Technical Advisory Group to MBIE and the MoH and the Covid Immunisation Implementation Advisory groups to the MoH.

More pseudo-scientific garbage from Tomljenovic and Shaw - Diplomatic Immunity

May 02, 2013 •

Persistent misuse of passively reported data – rat bags will always be rat bags but in the peer review and editorial process there is no excuse. The Annals of Medicine are the latest (vaguely respectable but not to be confused with The Annals of Internal Medicine) journal to publish the mischievous works of Lucija Tomljenovic and Christopher Shaw. Yet again the core tenet of the article depends on the misuse of passively reported pharmacovigilance data. Passive safety surveillance One of the crude but effective tools of vaccine safety monitoring, versions of which are present in most countries in the world, are passive reporting systems. The general rule of thumb is that if an event occurs after getting a vaccine and it is considered adverse then it should be reported. Most countries welcome reports from both the public and health professionals, faxed, posted, emailed of or … Read More

End of the line for genital warts is close - Diplomatic Immunity

Apr 26, 2013 •

This week is World Immunisation Awareness week so it is obligatory to mention NZ have now achieved pretty good immunisation coverage of its infants and the gap between ethnic groups and rich and poor is all but shut. The good In December 2012 NZ European and Maori had 90%, Pacific 93% and Asian 95%. The gap between rich and poor is almost non-existent (2 percentage points). More importantly, for a short time last year we appeared to be ahead of Australia who have been pretty smug about their excellent performance in this area. In the BMJ this week  appears the latest Australian data on the impact of the HPV programme on genital warts. The progress is quite astounding and I admit to particular excitement over figures 1 and 2, Which are very pretty indeed. The study reports: The … Read More