From 15 to 16 December 2025, an international workshop on the topic of ‘Immunity & Resistance’ took place at the University of Vienna. The workshop was organised in collaboration with Christian Haddad (Department of Science and Technology Studies and Department of Sociology) and Samantha Vanderslott (University of Oxford). In addition to closed panels, a public keynote event with Claas Kirchhelle (INSERM, Paris) and Janina Kehr (University of Vienna) took place on 15 December 2025 (17:00) in the Franz-König-Saal (Lecture Hall 06).

The workshop invited critical contributions from the social sciences and humanities to a workshop themed ‘immunity and resistance’. This theme intended to bring into view recent shifts and future trajectories of global/planetary health, taking vaccines and antibiotics – and their precarious roles in contemporary politics, societies and economies – as an empirical lens and conceptual starting point for discussions. The 20th century witnessed extraordinary progress in the field of global health, particularly in the control and mitigation of infectious diseases. Much of this success is attributable to two cornerstone technologies of biomedicine: vaccines and antibiotics. These innovations significantly reduced global morbidity and mortality and came to represent the promise of transformative medical advances. These advances, however, have encountered serious setbacks on several fronts due to the complex interplay of biological, environmental, socio-political, and political-economic developments.

First, on the microbial front, societies face not only a growing threat from emerging infectious diseases and zoonoses – most recently exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic – but also the relentless spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and consequently, drug resistant infections. AMR complicates the treatment of diseases once considered ‘conquered’ by modern drugs, thereby jeopardizing routine medical procedures and undermining the collective sense of safety ncapsulated in modern antibiotic drugs (Landecker, 2016).

Second, on the socio-political side, both vaccine hesitancy and inequity of access have presented major obstacles to realizing population immunity through vaccination. Vaccines help prevent infections caused by drug-resistant pathogens, such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, thereby intrinsically reducing the overall need for antimicrobial treatments. Despite this critical role, however, the value of vaccines in the fight against AMR is not adequately reflected in national policy responses, nor in mainstream public discourse (Charani et al., 2023; Jones et al., 2025). Beyond this, policy responses to the wealth of misinformation and regarding vaccination have so far failed to regain the public’s trust in vaccines.

Finally, political-economic factors have shaped biomedical research and development (R&D) in both vaccine development and antimicrobial treatments (Alas Portillo et al., 2024; Doganova & Rabeharisoa, 2024). The over-reliance on profit-driven R&D has meant that industry actors have set research and investment priorities that often inadequately match critical public health needs. This is especially evident in the antibiotics R&D sector, where industry-led innovation has stalled in recent decades (World Health Organization, 2024), and in the decline of publicly funded vaccine production initiatives (World Health Organization, 2022). Recent politically motivated attacks on biomedical research infrastructure, along with reduced investment in international cooperation, have compounded these policy challenges, which now appear resistant to resolution due to a high degree of scientific and political uncertainty, and significance of the values at stake.

Overall, these intricate challenges around immunity and resistance offer an intriguing empirical window through which to study the multi-layered shifts in global health, as well as the crises facing it today, requiring scholars and practitioners to (re)value the role of vaccines and antibiotics in contemporary (planetary) health governance. This requires conceptualizing vaccines and antibiotics as embedded in the shifting microbial, sociopolitical and political-economic terrains of global/planetary health.