You're putting words in my mouth. "Public health" deals with social problems regarding health, but it's a subset of "health" which also includes problems that are not social in nature.
There are absolutely social issues around vaccines — how do we fund their development? how do we distribute them? how do we convince people to use them? — but as a technology I would say they solve a problem that is mostly independent of human relationships.*
* Obviously, you could say that vaccines actually do solve a social problem because pathogens are often passed between humans, but I think then the definition of "social problems" becomes so broad as to be meaningless.
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You're putting words in my mouth. "Public health" deals with social problems regarding health, but it's a subset of "health" which also includes problems that are not social in nature.
There are absolutely social issues around vaccines — how do we fund their development? how do we distribute them? how do we convince people to use them? — but as a technology I would say they solve a problem that is mostly independent of human relationships.*
* Obviously, you could say that vaccines actually do solve a social problem because pathogens are often passed between humans, but I think then the definition of "social problems" becomes so broad as to be meaningless.