Vaccines protect, vaccines save lives, nevertheless…

Do we really appreciate what it takes to bring a safe and efficacious vaccine to millions if not billions of citizens with the aim to potentially eliminate or eradicate a vaccine-preventable infectious disease?

In fact, the more we learn about vaccination, the more we will discover about the complexities in research and development of vaccines; about confidence and trust of the citizen, the health worker, the financer and the policy maker. All these perspectives may impact vaccination policies.

And there are more aspects to it: the public health impact and the socio-economic impact of vaccines; understanding the vaccination ecosystem and its various components; the technical complexity of vaccines and ensuring equitable access. To help and get an overview of all these perspectives that are important for policymaking about vaccination, MSD has launched “Perspectives on Vaccination”.



Not only is this document giving facts, analysis and scientific references, but each perspective is accompanied by a visual storyline. The story is meant as a metaphor: it describes a group of organic gardeners that aim to protect their valuable gardens from the threat of pests. The challenges that the gardeners meet, in designing and implementing an effective policy to protect their gardens in a safe and sustainable way, are in many ways comparable to the challenges of vaccination policies.

Since vaccination matters to everyone, we wanted to combine two different, yet complementary ways to illustrate the perspectives on the topic: the evidence-based way, and the analogy with a visual storyline. 

Vaccines are one of the greatest public health success stories in history. MSD is a proud contributor to that story with over 125 years of experience in the discovery and development of novel solutions in the prevention of infectious diseases globally.

We hope that “Perspectives on Vaccination” will provide an innovative way to think about the value of vaccines and vaccination and contribute to reinforcing the need for a healthy vaccine ecosystem to ensure protection for all.