It spurred few grand social changes; there was, the historian Frank Snowden once said, a sort of social amnesia attached. Vaccines were a turning point and a triumph, but not a climax, not an end. You don’t get the sense public health will be valued any more here than it was before. As Humphries points out, the fear of an epidemic or pandemic can become paralyzing, and that is anathema to society. “That’s a theme in the history of public health: the impulse to deny that things are as bad as they seem.

Source: thestar May 29, 2022 20:08 UTC