NEWS | IN DEPTH
228 15 APRIL 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6590 science.org SCIENCECOVID-19 was taking hold, they submitted
a funding proposal to the National Insti-
tutes of Health (NIH), briefly noting that
if a pandemic emerged and vaccines were
developed, their network would be well-
suited to studying any side effects. The
application was turned down, as were sub-
sequent applications to the World Health
Organization and NIH.
Then in April 2021, with COVID-19 vac-
cination drives underway, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
awarded GVDN $5.5 million over 3 years
to study the safety of the vaccines. It was
a shoestring budget but enough to design
several projects, each drawing on large
health systems, regions within a country,
or, in some cases, as in New Zealand, a
nation’s entire population. One will study
heart inflammation associated with the
messenger RNA vaccines from Pfizer and
Moderna. Another will probe vaccine-
induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia, a
dangerous clotting disorder linked to viral
vector vaccines made by AstraZeneca and
Johnson & Johnson. The network will also
examine the risk of Guillain-Barré syn-
drome after COVID-19 vaccination, among
other projects.
“We’ve been trying for so long” to get
projects like these started, says Robert
Chen, scientific director of the Brigh-
ton Collaboration, which studies vaccine
safety, and a former director of CDC’s vac-
cine safety program. Chen notes that those
who advocate for improved vaccine safety
“have unfortunately been lumped into the
antivaccine groups” at times, even though
their goal, he says, is to make rare side ef-
fects even rarer.
Pulling the venture together has been
“gnarly,” Petousis-Harris says. It’s meant
middle-of-the-night conference calls across
a dozen time zones, and months spent
harmonizing the definition of a health
condition, like myocarditis, across hospi-
tal systems and countries. Getting at the
risk increase of complications after vacci-
nation is also statistically complex. Some
studies do this by comparing a vaccinated
population with an unvaccinated one and
assessing whether more of the former de-
velop, say, myocarditis. But unvaccinated
people differ from vaccinated ones in
other ways, which may cloud the results.
Instead, GVDN will use a method called a
“self-controlled case series.” For example,
they will identify everyone who suffered
myocarditis in the 60 days that followed
their last vaccine dose. Statisticians can
then examine whether and to what degree
participants were more likely to contract
the heart condition immediately after vac-
cination versus weeks later.
A massive data set could also begin to
crack other mysteries—in particular, who’s at
risk. Is postvaccine myocarditis more likely,
for example, if someone has another health
condition or takes a certain medication?
Another dream is to understand the bio-
logy underpinning side effects. Insights
could come from another nascent global
effort, called the International Network
of Special Immunization Services (INSIS),
which is now finalizing funding agree-
ments. Whereas GVDN aims to scoop up
and analyze COVID-19 vaccine data world-
wide and tackle genomics questions, INSIS
will examine the biology and immunology
of postvaccine problems as they are hap-
pening. The network’s leader, Karina Top,
a pediatric infectious disease specialist
at Dalhousie University, is working with
GVDN to identify patients and share data.
For now, the new efforts don’t include
difficult-to-diagnose health problems that
may be linked to the vaccines. Some people
have described Long Covid–like symptoms,
such as chronic headaches and irregular
heart rate and blood pressure, soon after
vaccination, but studying this phenomenon
is far more difficult (Science, 28 January,
p. 364). Headaches, for instance, are so com-
mon that no vaccine surveillance system
would detect an imbalance, says Rebecca
Chandler, who works on vaccine safety at
the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness In-
novations. She says that to discern patterns,
it’s crucial to review not just single words in
vaccine safety reports, but narratives from
doctors and patients.
“The subjective reports should not be
discounted as meaningless or unrelated,”
Carleton says. GVDN and INSIS, he and
others hope, will expand their scope as
time goes on, funding permitting.
Carleton’s suspicion is that much of
a person’s risk comes down to genet-
ics. Through GVDN, he’ll test whether
certain gene variants raise risk of post-
vaccine complications. He’s also planning
a solo project, setting up a website for any-
one who believes they’ve suffered a post–
COVID-19 vaccine adverse event, invit-
ing them to ship him a saliva sample and
health records.
The GVDN team hopes to have initial data
by late summer. “My sincere hope is that
once we prove the value of something like the
GVDN, we can secure longer term sustainable
funding,” says Ann Marie Navar, a cardio-
logist at the University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Center and a researcher with GVDN.
Chen, who’s advising INSIS, is cautiously op-
timistic, but knows the road ahead could be
bumpy. “Unless we find a way to stabilize”
funding for these projects, he says, “it’s very
easy for them to just collapse.” jB
eneath the Barberton Makhonjwa
Mountains, home to South Africa’s
original gold rush, lies something
more scientifically valuable than any
precious metal: Earth’s first land
ecosystem, trapped in a 3.2-billion-
year-old rock formation called the Moodies
Group. In roadcuts and mineshafts, scien-
tists had already glimpsed fossilized rem-
nants of the slimy microbial mats thought
to have covered the ancient rivers, beaches,
and estuaries. Now, they are drilling into
the terrain for the first time, retrieving
fresh samples of what may have been
Earth’s first microbial producers of oxygen.
“It’s really lucky there are places as old as
this,” says Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is
unaffiliated with the project. Although older
signs of life have been found in South Africa
and Australia—and potentially Greenland—
in what were once ocean deposits, no other
spots record primordial life on land so con-
vincingly, she says. “This covers a not-well-
understood time in Earth’s history.”
When the Moodies Group formed, Earth
would have been nearly unrecognizable.
Its atmosphere, rich in methane and car-
bon dioxide but nearly devoid of oxygen,
kept the planet warm while the Sun was
young and faint. Land was scarce because
plate tectonics, the process that assembles
continents, was just getting going. Here
and there, however, volcanic archipelagos
like the Moodies Group pierced the waters.
Beaches ringing the volcanoes would have
been ideal spaces for life to evolve and
spread, says Christoph Heubeck, a sedi-
mentary geologist at the Friedrich Schiller
University of Jena. He leads the $2 mil-
lion Barberton Archaean Surface Envi-
ronments (BASE) project, which plans to
complete drilling its eighth and final core
next month.Earth’s oldest
land ecosystem
spotted in
drilled cores
Campaign probes for earliest
signs of oxygen-producing life
EARTH SCIENCEBy Paul Voosen