Many of the worlds problematic pathogens continue to lack effective vaccines against them despite vigorous vaccine development efforts.It appears that many of these "vaccine resistant" pathogens escape natural host immune responses by inducing strain-specific immunity to immunodominant epitopes that are subsequently able to mutate altering their antigenic profiles.The immune system appears to be decoyed into reacting to these immunodominant epitopes that offer little cross protection between other serotypes or subtypes circulating in other hosts as well as quasi species within a host.A large number of pathogens appear to exploit this weakness in the host immune system by focusing antigenic attention upon highly variable epitopes not necessarily essential for function while avoiding immune surveillance against more highly conserved and critical regions that define the essence of the pathogen.Because the propensity of the immune system to react against immunodominant strain-specific epitopes appears to be genetically hard-wired,the phenomenon has been termed "deceptive imprinting." Because of the deceptive imprinting phenomenon,traditional vaccine development strategies are hampered in their ability to elicit broadly protective immunity against vaccine resistant pathogens; hence,novel approaches are needed such as those that refocus immune responses towards more conserved and desirable targets.Vaccine development strategies designed to circumvent deceptive imprinting and elicit broadly protective immunity against vaccine resistant pathogens will be presented in the context of developing broadly protective vaccines against human immunodeficiency virus,influenza virus,and human rhinovirus.