“Vaccination has successfully reduced the burden of infectious diseases worldwide, but stagnating immunization coverage and lack of effective vaccines for many endemic and newly emerging pathogens pose a threat to sustainable global health.”
Even though vaccines represent one of the biggest medical conquests of our time, avoiding thousand of deaths every day, global coverage rates are still relatively low, mostly due to lack of resources in many countries, unfunded mistrust of people of collateral effects (a deleterious social phenomenon which is becoming particularly evident in recent years) and the fact that, to date, we are still unable to develop vaccines for many diffused pathologies (such as HIV or malaria).
Nonetheless, new technological advances in this field such as the discovery of new antigens, isolation of antibody from protected individuals or mRNA-based vaccines represent only a small fraction of the new avenues of research currently used and investigated that, altogether, embody a concrete reason for hope.