Back in my June 2020 editorial, when talking about the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote about the 1993 classic movie, “Groundhog Day.” We were about four months into the pandemic and had approximately 4 million global cases and 275,000 deaths at the time. People were getting used to their “new normal” of going nowhere, masking, social distancing, and quarantine. Fast forward one very long year later, and we are seeing the United States begin to return to the old normal. While it has been a bumpy year for a variety of reasons, most public health mitigation techniques worked in slowing the spread of COVID-19 to some degree. There is no doubt, however, that COVID-19 vaccines have had the biggest impact on our ability to return to normal. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states, “Vaccines are one of the greatest success stories in public health,” (www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/history/index.html ).

The use of vaccinations dates back well before Edward Jenner’s late 1700s use of cowpox pustules (against smallpox) or Louis Pasteur’s rabies vaccine in the late 1800s. There is even evidence that many societies used inoculation to fight disease many years before this. However, it was not until the middle of the 20th century that widespread vaccination technologies really hit the mainstream in preventing diseases such as smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio in the 1950s and rubella, mumps, and measles in the 1960s. In the 1980s to 1990s, we saw vaccines developed to prevent hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae. And, more recently we have seen vaccines for varicella, rotavirus, pneumococcus, influenza, and COVID-19.

We hope that you encourage your patients and communities to take every opportunity to continue with vaccination for COVID-19, as we still have a long way to go—but the end of the pandemic is hopefully near. We wish all of our readers, patients, and the general public the best health as we come together globally to continue fighting COVID-19.

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