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YellowCard
Vaccine Monitor

Sign up information

To participate in the Yellow Card Vaccine Monitor, you will need read and agree to the below details.

This programme is called the Yellow Card Vaccine Monitor and it helps continuously monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. It’s run by the UK’s independent regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

A vaccine will only be used once it has been approved for use by the MHRA. To be approved, it must meet robust standards on safety, quality and effectiveness through clinical trials.

Signing up to Yellow Card Vaccine Monitor is entirely voluntary and will not impact your booking to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

How to sign-up to Yellow Card Vaccine Monitor.

Thank you for helping us monitor vaccine safety.  

Please follow these easy steps to complete the registration process.

  1. Please read our privacy policy and these sign-up details and then select ‘AGREE’ at the bottom of the page.

  2. Register by providing your details. Please fill in as much information as possible. If you don’t know the exact details, please provide what you can to help us with our analysis.

  3. Once you’ve been vaccinated, we will ask you to tell us the COVID-19 vaccine brand name and batch number. Please write down these details, if you can, when you receive the vaccine. You can still participate if you do not know this information.

  4. We will then contact you by email, SMS or pop-up notification to ask if you’ve had any symptoms that you believe are related to the vaccine.

  5. We will follow up with you every few weeks to begin with and we will follow-up with you less frequently after.

Who we are

The UK’s medicines and medical devices regulator is known as the MHRA. The MHRA is a regulatory centre of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (also known as ‘The Agency’) which also includes the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) and the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD).

The agency is an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) established on 01 April 2003.

The agency’s mission is to protect and improve the health of millions of people every day through the effective regulation of medicines and medical devices, underpinned by science and research.

No product is completely free of risk, but sound evidence underpins all the MHRA’s decisions to ensure that these risks are minimised.

A key responsibility of the MHRA is to continuously monitor the safety of vaccines once they are approved for use. This monitoring includes collecting information directly from patients and healthcare professionals and is an existing and well-established process.

Why we monitor vaccines

MHRA is responsible for continuously monitoring the safety of all medicines and vaccines once they are approved for use.

Vaccines are the most effective way to prevent infectious diseases and they save millions of lives worldwide.

Like all medicines, vaccines can cause side effects. Most of these are mild and short-term, and not everyone gets them.

As with all medicines and vaccines, other side effects can come to light when used by larger volumes of people.

What we will do with reports of side effects

The Yellow Card Vaccine Monitor is part of our long-established UK system for collecting and monitoring information on suspected safety concerns involving medicines and medical devices.

In case there are previously unknown safety issues, reports of suspected side effects are continually evaluated by a team of medicine safety experts.  This team is made up of doctors, pharmacists and scientists who study the benefits and risks of medicines and vaccines.

They consider other information, such as clinical trial data, medical literature and data from international medicines regulators. This helps us ensure that the benefits of the vaccine continue to outweigh any side effect risks.

Processing and protecting your data

The privacy of your data will be protected and processed in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Your data will be collected in line with our privacy policy which you will need to read. We may link this data to NHS records to support data analysis. Further detail is discussed within our privacy policy.

Anonymised analysis will be shared with the MHRA Vaccine Expert Working Group, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation and the Department of Health and Social Care. Details of how we might share data is provided in our privacy policy.

If you want to stop taking part

Participation is voluntary and you are free to change your mind and withdraw at any time. You do not need to provide a reason. Further information on opting out after registering can be found on the Information Commissioner's Office website and in the privacy policy.