Prof Mulholland is professor of child health and vaccinology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and also shares his time with two Australian institutions, including the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne.
He is visiting the University of Otago Centre for International Health and this week gave the McAuley Oration, a public lecture on ''New Vaccines for the Developing World - Who is Responsible?''.
This lecture, at the Otago Museum, was given as part of the sixth annual conference of the Otago International Health Research Network, which is supported by the centre.
Prof Mulholland said in an interview that over the years, there had been sharply divided opinions among some Western advocates of vaccination programmes in the developing world.
Some people believed that every dollar spent on vaccination-related research where an existing vaccine was already available was ''a dollar wasted''. And they believed that money could have been better spent on vaccination.
But he and some other medical staff took the view that research before, during and after vaccination programmes in developing countries was an essential part of best practice and was necessary for a host of reasons, including to protect patients from any unintended adverse health effects.
Research was also needed to check on a wide range of things, including the best time intervals in a series of injections given to newborn children. Undertaking proper research was a ''moral imperative'' and an ethical requirement.
And there were a host of reasons for undertaking such research, including to ensure that costly vaccination campaigns were run most efficiently and effectively.
It was well known that some vaccination efforts had worked well in some places and not in others.
The Otago Centre for International Health was undertaking important vaccination-related research and its work involving tuberculosis in Indonesia was clearly of international significance, he said.
He believed there was a moral duty for governments involved in supporting vaccination efforts in developing countries to ensure the proper research was also being carried out.
The Australian and New Zealand Governments should use their good offices to ensure more vaccine-related research was undertaken, he said.
