Career wisdom delivered straight from the Vial

“Feeling you have made a difference for someone, someway,” was the key piece of career advice Christophe Vial, Sanofi’s Head of Travel Vaccines for Australia, New Zealand and Korea, gave three school students this week when he sat down to talk with them about vaccines.

And after a 30-year career in health that has crossed both public and private sectors, Christophe has indeed made a difference.

A pharmacist by training in his native France but knowing he did not want to go into retail pharmacy, Christophe added a marketing degree to widen his options and got a job in the pharmaceutical industry in Canada before moving to Australia and working with Sanofi here then in Thailand.

A career pivot in 2005 saw him join the Department of Health to work in innovation for seven years before returning to Sanofi for a job in the Philippines, then back to Australia where he was Head of Public Markets for a decade before moving into his current role.

“It’s been quite a whirlpool of different opportunities,” Christophe told the students. “A career is never linear. You should have a plan and a vision, and at the same time, you should be able to say, ‘Hey, I’d like to try that and do something different’.”

It was good advice, and the students hung on his every word as Christophe shared his passion for travel vaccines, reinforcing the importance of getting vaccinated.

“Before you travel, we recommend every traveller visits their healthcare professional and asks for advice,” he said. “Preparing for travel is like getting insurance to cover you for a bad accident. For example, it could be buying a mosquito net or malaria tablets, or getting a vaccine against typhoid fever.”

Travel vaccines are not publicly funded and young people on a budget are always looking to find savings, but Christophe was quick to convince the students this was one cost they did not want to skip. His story of an English girl who found a litter of abandoned puppies on the street in the Philippines, took them to a shelter only to return to England and die of rabies was hard to forget. It did the trick.

“If you look at the total cost of your travel, the vaccine is a fraction of that,” said Christophe. “If you spend a week in hospital, that’s a lot of money. If you’ve got to leave the country and come back to Australia to seek treatment, that’s weeks of your holiday that you never get back.”

With increasing resistance to vaccines in young people, Christophe also spoke with the students about diseases eradicated by vaccines. He shares the story of the last person to live their life in an iron lung due to polio, reinforcing how vaccines protect society from deadly diseases.

Asked by one student about Covid-19 vaccines, Christophe acknowledges how vaccine fatigue set in following the pandemic.

“All I can tell you is that the Covid vaccines worked, and they did save lives,” he says. “I caught Covid and got sick quite badly, and it took me months and months to recover. I know a lot of friends who did too.

“In the end, all vaccines provide benefits, Covid vaccines among them. It’s always easy to look back and to say, ‘Oh, if we had done things differently’, or, ‘It wasn’t necessary to vaccinate everyone’, but at the time decisions were made, I believe they were mostly the right decisions – and they did save lives.”

Christophe is also Lead of Sanofi’s Gender+ Employee Business Resource Group. Having a male leading such a cause may have struck the three female students as unusual, but Christophe was quick to put their minds at ease.

“I grew up in a gender‑inequal society,” he says. “Men hired people who looked like them. Our senior management at Sanofi is mostly female, and it’s absolutely amazing. The general managers for Australia and for Korea, Australia and New Zealand are women, as is the CFO.

“Around 70 per cent of our staff are women. Men are now the minority at work – and that’s fine. It will flow back and forth. Sanofi is a leading company in Australia in terms of attracting men and women, and I’m very proud to be working here.”

Following a photo and another gaze out the full length windows at the amazing view from Sanofi’s stunning new Barangaroo offices, it was back to the lifts for the journey home.

“Wasn’t he the best,” remarks one student to nods of agreement from her friends, and indeed, Christophe was excellent. Hopefully, his words of wisdom on the importance of vaccines, and equality in the workplace, will stay with these three for many years to come, through their careers and into parenthood, helping them make good decisions for themselves and for others.

*MedNews would like to thank Sanofi’s Loren McMurtrie for organising this visit and hosting us along with Country Lead Liz Selby, Corporate Affairs Head Luke Cornish, and Christophe Vial for taking the time to speak with the students. 

We also wish to thank Novartis Corporate Affairs Head Brooke Howard and Sydney Morning Herald journalist Kayla Olaya for sharing their time and career journeys on the day.

©MedNews 2026