The Masks We’ll Wear in the Next Pandemic
Updated at 3:25 p.m. ET on October 14, 2022
On one level, the world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic over the past two and half years was a major triumph for modern medicine. We developed COVID vaccines faster than we’d developed any vaccine in history, and began administering them just a year after the virus first infected humans. The vaccines turned out to work better than top public-health officials had dared hope. In tandem with antiviral treatments, they’ve drastically reduced the virus’s toll of severe illness and death, and helped hundreds of millions of Americans resume something approximating pre-pandemic life.
And yet on another level, the pandemic has demonstrated the inadequacy of such pharmaceutical interventions. In the time it took vaccines to arrive, more than 300,000 people died of COVID in America alone. Even since, waning immunity and the semi-regular emergence of new variants have made for an uneasy détente. Another 700,000 Americans have died over that period, vaccines and antivirals notwithstanding.
For some pandemic-prevention experts, the takeaway here is that pharmaceutical interventions alone simply won’t cut it. Though shots and drugs may be essential to softening a virus’s blow
