The Adult Immunization Board (AIB): A new platform to provide multidisciplinary guidelines for the implementation and optimization of adult immunization in Europe

People can be at risk of getting and spreading serious vaccinepreventable infectious diseases throughout their lives and can therefore benefit from a lifelong approach to vaccination. While traditionally national immunization programs have focused primarily on vaccines for infants and school-aged children, in recent years adult vaccination programs (including e.g., pregnant women, travelers, immunocompromised, health care providers and older adults) have received increasing attention in many countries. However, even in countries with adult vaccination recommendations, vaccination coverage among the above-mentioned target groups remains often low. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of adult vaccination became more than apparent to several national health governments, which urgently had to set up adult vaccination programs and infrastructures to administer COVID-19 vaccines to an unprecedentedly wide target population. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought increased global attention to the need of providing vaccination to all age groups (and, in particular, adult age groups), but also highlighted challenges and deficiencies in approaches to achieve higher uptake of vaccination. Several organizations, including governments, (inter)national public health organizations and vaccine manufactures are currently considering how adult immunization can be further extended to include additional diseases, and how it can be implemented, in order to increase its impact, and guarantee a lifelong approach to vaccination. Although many organizations are committed to promote adult vaccination, until present there was no independent multidisciplinary information and discussion platform focusing on this topic in a comprehensive way at the European level. In order to fill this gap, a group of European experts in the field of adult vaccination established the Adult Immunization Board (AIB) in 2022.