Why I Will Take Whichever (Approved) Covid-19 Vaccine I’m Given

An epidemiologist’s personal perspective

Pictured: great stuff. Photo: SELF Magazine

Note: This is my individual opinion about my own choices. There’s a bit of public health stuff in here too, but what I’m really going over is why I will make a choice for me and not what the best decision for society as a whole might be from an epidemiological standpoint.

After a year of darkness, vaccines really are the light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel. Yes, vaccination programs take time, and yes, they don’t fix anything immediately. There’s also a huge issue with wealthy countries hoarding vaccine doses and something of an ethical nightmare about how we effectively distribute these life-saving interventions across the globe.

All that being said, the Covid-19 vaccines are nothing short of a scientific masterpiece. We should all be immensely grateful to be potentially getting one in 2021, rather than years from now.

The Covid-19 vaccine development is quite literally the fastest such effort in human history. Impressive stuff. Photo: SELF Magazine

But despite the generally fabulous nature of the situation when it comes to vaccines, many of us are now faced with something of a difficult question: Which vaccine should I get?