As health care workers and susceptible citizens receive the first COVID-19 vaccinations, many hope this will mark the beginning of the end of a dark, deadly period. But the vaccine rollout also deepens the same problems we’ve been facing all year: who are our most vulnerable, and how do we help them in an equitable way?

Last week, two of the editors of Vulnerable: The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19, talked government response and accountability. The remaining three editors, Jane Philpott, Sophie Thériault, and Sridhar Venkatapuram, join us to continue the conversation. In these next two episodes, we shift gears into the equity and vulnerabilities of government response to COVID. What structural changes need to happen to prevent another public health crisis?

In this episode, we tackle policy measures, global response, and frontline workers. Sophie takes us through the First Nations’ roadmap on federal funding and measures to protect them from public health crises–how is this strategy relevant to safeguarding other underserved groups? Sridhar explains the dangers we’ve seen in officials treating populations as equally susceptible to the virus. Jane discusses the challenges of frontline workers that government officials fail to see, and how she hopes they’ll no longer be undervalued: “You can have all of the emergency departments and ICU beds ready that you’d like, but if you don’t actually have those frontline health workers, who are paid very little and put themselves at enormous risk … then people will die.”