Given that much of the world is
facing the challenge of a third wave
(France, Germany, Japan, Korea,
Spain) or even still the first wave
(India, the US), it requires a degree
of ‘blue-sky thinking’ to contemplate
what a post-COVID-19 world will
look like – even though the first
vaccines are now being widely
administered to populations outside
the clinical trial setting in several
countries (including the UK and the
US). As with any prediction, unless
one is either lucky, a gifted visionary,
or, indeed, both, the further into the
future one goes, the less accurate
the forecast is likely to be. With that
caveat, I would like to suggest a few
themes that I think it is reasonable
to expect will feature in this new,
post-pandemic landscape – which
I will place, a tad optimistically
perhaps, in the first half of 2022.
In order to reach this position, there
will have to be an effective vaccine
– or, rather more likely, several
effective vaccines – which will have
been administered to very many
people in most of the world. This is
likely to have a significant impact
on pharmacovigilance globally, both
in terms of the number of reports,
which will foreseeably arise from
the vaccine’s administration itself,
and because most, if not all, other
reports of (suspected) adverse drug
reactions will necessarily involve the
COVID-19 vaccine(s) as concomitant
medication(s).
|
