On 8 December 2020, a 90-year-old British woman became the first person in the world to receive a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Five years on, more than 13.64 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered. Thanks to the rapid roll-out of these vaccines, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency in May 2023. The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a turning point for public health ' but the downstream effects haven't all been positive, argues Kristen Panthagani, a physician at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. In March 2020, Panthagani started a newsletter called You Can Know Things, which originally focused on addressing rumours and myths about COVID-19 vaccines and public-health measures. It now explores how the miscommunication of science and health measures has damaged public trust in vaccines and scientific research. The pandemic was a steep learning curve. Nobody in our generation had ever...
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