How do see the role of partners within the reorganized National Immunization Program?
The new Center will bring together immunizations from vaccine development through program implementation. Many of the partners that NIP has had are similar to the partners that NCID has had in terms of healthcare groups, state health departments, vaccine manufacturers, the research community, and the policy community. I hope that our new Center can be one-stop shopping for vaccine related issues; that partners will find us easy to work with, accessible, and responsive. We will need our partners more than ever, in the sense that we’ll have the full range of immunization responsibilities. The new Center brings together vaccine delivery and adult immunization, the influenza branch, the surveillance research, and the laboratory activities involved with that. I hope that we can really strengthen our partnerships and raise the profile of these programs. While vaccine safety has been taken out of NIP, issues concerning vaccine safety continue to be of critical concern to our partners. What wo
