COVID-19 and the challenge of herd immunity: what role can the law play, asks Sarah Moore
At 6:31am GMT on Tuesday 8 December, a 90-year-old British grandmother made world history.
Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world to receive dose one of the two dose Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine outside of a clinical trial. Twenty one days later, as 2020 ended, Margaret received her second and final dose. In doing so she initiated a mass population vaccination programme that is likely to dominate the UK’s public health agenda for years to come.
The objective of that agenda is to reduce the infection rate of COVID-19 in the UK. Science and medicine have played a fundamental role in getting us to this point but, as set out here, the law now has a potentially transformative contribution to make. By providing a ‘safety net’ permitting access to substantive compensation in the event that adverse health effects are experienced as a result of vaccination in the coming months, the law has the potential to counter trends in vaccine hesitancy. This will be key
