World Immunisation Week provides a chance to reflect on how vaccinations can bring us closer together and improve global health. After a year that has starkly demonstrated how individual health is connected to global health, the world needs coordinated and inclusive immunisation more than ever. 

With the rise of misinformation and fake news, what challenges do immunisation programmes face today? With vaccination efforts more relevant and critical now than they have been for a century, what lessons can we learn from the history of immunisation? 

This is our weekly edit of the global conversation on purpose. 

• Corporate giants are stepping in to help in the fight against India’s surging covid cases (Bloomberg). 
• The precedent for global vaccine passports has not been reset since 1918 – what could the new controversial ‘platinum card’ of the pandemic look like around the world? (NY Times)
• With the spread of fake vaccine news threatening global immunisation efforts, Nina Schick talks about disinformation and the rise of synthetic media in this episode of the 80,000 Hours Podcast.  
• Mckinsey takes a look at what an employer’s role should be in the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine. 
• Hothouse Solutions, a weekly climate action newsletter focusing on solutions to the biggest problem we’re facing, reflects on whether adventure and travel is an innate need for humans, and how we will travel in a post-pandemic, vaccinated future. 
• Should Covid-19 vaccines be mandatory in workplaces? (Financial Times) 
• Why leading scientists are urging richer countries to share vaccine doses with poorer countries in order to benefit the whole world (The Guardian). 
• Trust is key: three ways that employers can help to fight against vaccine skepticism (Fast Company). 
• Watch Heidi Larson discuss at the very start of the pandemic how medical rumours are spread, the effect they have on immunisation efforts, and how to rebuild trust (TED Talk). 

And finally, some words from Lady Mary Montagu. She first introduced the concept of inoculation into England after having her son variolated in Constantinople in 1717. Her decision directly paved the way to Edward Jenner’s first cowpox vaccine in 1796, the birth of modern immunology and the prevention of countless deaths.

From A Letter to a Friend, 1717: “The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless … I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England.”