Un-personalized medicine: the challenges of vaccines as a single medicine for a whole population

The simple message is that vaccines have had an enormous beneficial impact of in reducing infection, disease and death.But vaccines themselves are not simple, the last 5 years have (re)taught us how incredibly complex they are.A critical consideration is that vaccines are both an individual drug and a population level intervention.At the individual level, consumers want a risk-free product with minimal side effects.The ideal vaccine would provide lifelong, sterilising immunity, preventing infection from ever taking hold in the first place, or if infection occurs rapidly clearing the pathogen with no symptoms.However, from a public health perspective, different outcomes and endpoints might be more of a