Editorial by Mr Zachary Desson | EHMA newsletter
30 April 2026
An editorial by Mr Zachary Desson, Principal Scientific and Policy Advisor at EHMA, published in conjunction with World Immunization Week 2026, observed from 24 to 30 April 2026.
Over the last fifty years, vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives. That is six lives every single minute, every day, for five decades. More children now live to see their first birthday than at any other point in human history. They grow up, fall in love, have their own families. Quietly, and without fanfare, vaccination has been one of the most transformative forces in our recent history.
Despite this, vaccination is rarely recognised for what it is: one of the most powerful and cost-effective tools we have to protect public health.
The COVID-19 pandemic briefly forced the world to re-engage with the value of vaccines. For a moment in time, immunisation was front-page news. Then the crisis faded, and attention moved on to more attention-grabbing matters like climate change, geopolitical upheaval, and economic anxiety. Vaccination has again slipped into the background, treated as a slightly inconvenient routine rather than an extraordinary medical achievement.
This is the paradox at the heart of prevention. The better it works, the more easily it drops out of public consciousness.
As we look back on World Immunization Week 2026 and its theme ‘For every generation, vaccines work’, it is a good moment to be honest about where we stand. Of course, we can observe metrics like coverage targets and policy frameworks, but I believe it is equally important to reflect on our ability to actually reach people with the message of vaccine effectiveness.
Most experts who have spent meaningful time with the evidence on vaccination are, I think, guilty of a certain overconfidence. We assume that data speaks for itself. It does not. Evidence is necessary, but it has never, on its own, been enough to overcome structural barriers to vaccination, or to address the genuine questions of people who are hesitant for entirely understandable reasons.
Earlier this month, I moderated a webinar hosted by the ECDC Lighthouse, titled ‘From hesitancy to acceptance: Using empathy to respond to vaccination misinformation’. The session introduced participants to a method called Empathetic Refutation Interviewing. This approach starts not with correcting people, but with genuinely listening to them. It was a reminder that trust is not built through arguments, but through real human connection. If we want communities to make informed choices about vaccination, we have to meet them where they are, not where we wish they were.
This is the kind of innovation that deserves to be embedded as standard practice in our health systems.
In the context of public health, however, empathy still needs to be supported by evidence. Through projects like PREPACT and RELIEVE, EHMA has worked with clinicians and health managers across Europe to build robust, evidence-based prevention strategies for RSV and pneumococcal disease. We helped put together a European Call to Action with a concrete ambition: a 75% vaccination coverage target for pneumococcal disease in older adults. Through the recently concluded Overcoming Obstacles to Vaccination project, we have helped public health professionals from across Europe come together to share the kind of practical lessons that rarely make it into official guidance. We have tried to capture some of that accumulated wisdom in our latest publication on the topic, ‘Improving vaccination coverage rates in adult populations: A handbook for health managers and policymakers’.
If we want to ensure that humanity remains well-protected against communicable disease and extend vaccination coverage to those who don’t yet have it, we need to find ways to combine evidence and empathy to generate political will, at a moment when attention is scarce and competing priorities are loud. As an example, transparent Health Technology Assessment frameworks specifically designed for vaccines might open deeper conversations with policymakers by engaging directly with their political and economic realities.
The theme of this year’s World Immunization Week is a quiet but powerful one. For every generation is not just a celebration of the past, but an obligation to the future. Decisions made today by parents, clinicians, health managers, and policymakers will shape the health of communities for generations to come. Our job as health managers is to make sure that everyone inherits both the protection that vaccination provides and the wisdom to keep choosing it.
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