Vaccination or immunisation is considered one of the greatest public health interventions in the world, saving millions of lives a year.
For World Immunisation Week, which falls on the last week of April every year, Associate Professor Hsu Li Yang, Programme Leader (Infectious Diseases), penned a commentary on immunisation, how vaccines work and are developed, and why a COVID-19 vaccine is no magic bullet.
In an ideal situation, we are able to develop a COVID-19 vaccine that provides universal lifelong protection.
But this may not be the case and the vaccine developed may not offer 100 per cent protection (like in the case of the influenza vaccine, which is approximately 50 per cent). This would still be effective if a very high percentage of the population is vaccinated.
If ultimately we fail to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, all is not lost, as the non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by different countries have been effective in containing the spread of the virus and minimising loss of lives, including in Singapore.
In particular, territories like South Korea and Taiwan have been able to do this without lockdowns and with minimal disruption to society. They can be role models for such a future.
Great effort has and will go towards the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, wrote Assoc Prof Hsu, but it is good to understand that “this will very likely not be a magic bullet that will eliminate the virus from the world”.
Read the full commentary here: