Lessons from South Korea's vaccination initiative can help cultivate planetary health action

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Sep 22 2022

South Korea had administered more COVID-19 vaccine doses per 100 people than other developed countries by the end of March 2022. A new article published in the peer-reviewed OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology presents six pivotal lessons learned from South Korea's whole-of-government approach to successful COVID-19 vaccine roll out.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored that systems medicine depends on health systems and services that can respond to planetary health threats in scale and with speed."

Shin Ae Hong, PhD, Author, Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea

Dr. Hong provides an overview of Korea's pandemic response and identifies and provides a detailed description of six factors that account for Korea's robust national vaccination initiative: governance system; logistic capability; delivery strategy and accessibility; public health infrastructure; risk communication; and public cooperation and engagement.

"The lessons from South Korea can help cultivate planetary health action in other parts of the world during the current COVID-19 pandemic, and in ecological crises in the future," says Dr. Hong.

"Vaccine rollout and its governance are as important as vaccine discovery and development. The study makes an important contribution by unpacking the multiple determinants of COVID-19 vaccine rollout in South Korea, and from the vaccine factory to the public health clinic. Therefore, the paper has relevance for a very wide range of readers interested in vaccine discovery and development, engineering, manufacturing, systems medicine and public health. The findings inform global governance for science, technology and innovation in the current era of COVID-19 and ecological crises. I invite new manuscripts on large-scale biology, ecology, and critical governance of vaccines and other planetary health interventions for peer review in the journal," says Vural özdemir, MD, PhD, DABCP, Editor-in-Chief of OMICS.