There'll get worn down over time as it finally registers that Covid isn't going away. As long as one person has it , then it will continue to be passed on. Vaccine is no pancea. Whether it's their job, their family, their ability to travel. The impacts will continue to be felt at an individual level.
I consistently see statements, not just with regard to Covid, but concerning disease in general, that "
Vaccine is no pancea." I think this comes from a combination of the influence of the "anti-vaxers" (whose position, as far as I have been able to discern, is based completely on anecdotal statistics and completely debunked pseudo-science which is not at all generally accepted in the medical community or supported by any peer-reviewed studies), and people's reaction to Flu-shots (because people who take them sometimes get other strains of the Flu that the Flu-shot does not defend against). Growing up, I had 100% confidence in vaccines, and for good reason. I knew people a generation older than me, including my good friend, the late Gordon Neilson of King & Country, who had contracted Polio just before Jonas Salk developed the Polio Vaccine, and who had difficulty walking their entire lives, but literally none of my contempories contracted Polio, which basically ceased to exist because of the Polio Vaccine. Any number of other diseases which had long killed or crippled people also disappeared during my generation. But then, at some point in the 1980's, suddenly people believed that vaccines caused autism. The doctor who come up with this dubious proposition, the leader of the "Anti-Vaxxer" movement, could not point to any scientific evidence that supported his position, and eventually lost his license to practice medicine. Despite the complete absence of scientific evidence to back up the "anti-vaxxer" position, certain celebreties caught onto the idea, and convinced a good portion of the population not to vaccinate their children. Now diseases like Polio, which had completely disappeared, are making a comeback, and people facing a pandemic like Covid don't believe that a vaccine is the solution, and declare, before the vaccine has even been put into limited use, that they will not take it, and it won't be a solution. Don't get me wrong, as someone who does not have a high-risk factor, I am not rushing out to take the vaccine. I want to see it used on millions of people for at least 6 months (so, if it goes into use in December, 2020, I will wait until May, 2021), to make sure the unusually quickly developed and approved vaccine is truly safe, but at that point, if there are not dangerous side-effects, I will take it, as will my wife and (if approved for teenagers) my children. The way I see it, if it is truly 95% effective, is also effective in preventing the spread, and, even if you get the virus, the symptoms are significantly milder, as has been reported, it will, in fact, be a panacea for Covid, which will disappear very quickly once the majority of people are vaccinated. If 95 people out of 100 cannot get or pass along the virus upon exposure, and the remaining 5 people cannot pass it along to 95 out of 100 people they encounter, the number of people who get the virus will drop precipitously. Additionally, if those who get it have only minor sympoms, hospitals will no longer be in danger of being overwhelmed, and deaths from the virus should virtually disappear. If the vaccine is truly 95% effective, like Polio, Covid should no longer pose a significant threat.
That being said, governments need to learn from this pandemic, as there will be others in future. Once the crisis is behind us, we need to see what the most effective approaches to the virus have been, and create a nationwide (and hopefully an international) plan to address the next pandemic.
