Enhancing self-medication practices in the era of infodemic: the role of pharmacovigilance

The COVID-19 pandemic has represented one of the most important public health events of the last century, with more than 6.9 million deaths attributable to the disease. Fortunately, the advent of vaccines for this disease, almost a year after the appearance of the pandemic, drastically changed the global panorama, preventing at least 14 million additional deaths just in the first year of vaccination. The combination of knowledge from many areas of expertise has allowed humanity to overcome the pandemic in an incredibly short period of time. Apart from the fundamental problem of finding preventive and therapeutic strategies to control the disease – something practically solved thanks to the vaccines – the pandemic has been characterized by an avalanche of information, often incorrect and lacking in scientific evidence, about potential new therapies that did not provide any benefit, but did have an associated risk of adverse effects, sometimes serious or even fatal. Likewise, the appearance of vaccines in record time compared to the usual times of clinical research generated mistrust in some sectors of the population, who viewed with concern the appearance of some serious but at the same time very infrequent adverse events (e.g. cavernous sinus thrombosis). This excessive concern was largely due to not having a clear idea of the risk-benefit ratio of vaccines for COVID-19, based on ignorance of the extreme rarity of this type of event, as well as a lack of awareness of the high effectiveness of these vaccines in preventing serious or fatal forms of the disease – even though it doesn’t have a significant effect to diminish the contagion risk. This clearly favorable risk-benefit ratio has made it possible to offer the vaccination (and application of booster doses) to practically all population groups, from 6 months onwards.

• Fecha de publicación: 2023
• Institución: Universidad del Rosario
• Repositorio: Repositorio EdocUR - U. Rosario
• Idioma: eng
• OAI Identifier: oai:repository.urosario.edu.co:10336/42121
• Acceso en línea: https://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/42121
• Palabra clave: COVID-19; COVID-19 vaccines; editorial; pharmacovigilance; infodemic; self-medication
• License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International