The intermingling of the social and the science is a delicate process which creates multifaceted healthcare interventions aimed at the targeting of disease spread and following eradication. The recent COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent curfews and lockdowns have created a sense of restlessness towards addressing the virus. The global face of COVID-19 alleviation is the vaccine. Vaccines, when widely and equally distributed, provide relatively rapid treatment to combat the spread of infectious diseases. This narrative, combined with those fueled through prematurely published news articles, may encourage the idea that vaccines will be the silver bullet response in tackling COVID-19. However, a long-term pandemic such as COVID-19 has equally lengthy socioeconomic repercussions following from the supposed ‘end’, such as increased unemployment rates and lack of accessibility to adequate medical care. The vaccine could prove impactful, yet these stipulations suggest that the overreliance on a miracle cure is ill-advised and should be cushioned by thorough policy-making addressing all sectors affected by the virus.
The Emergence of the COVID Vaccine: Silver Bullet? by Lucas van den Heuvel and edited by Taylor Brown licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0