Current and Future Lessons from the COVID Pandemic

The current COVID pandemic appears to be under control, Yet, these past three years have been both challenging and exciting. The rapid development of effective mRNA COVID vaccines is a major scientific breakthrough that will impact future pandemics as well as providing protocols to treat other diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and cancers. The unresolved challenges emerging from the pandemic include the effectiveness of lockdowns, social distancing, mandatory vaccinations, prioritizing patient treatments, and wearing masks. In this talk, I will review the breakthroughs and ethical challenges of the COVID pandemic and present a future perspective of what needs to be done, on a scientific and government level, to better react to viral or bacterial pandemics.