Oh, pandemics can certainly have long-lasting social and cultural effects. I ran into something quite interesting just the other day while playing with Google's Ngram on a whim. This is the occurrence of the word "contamination" in contemporary English texts in the last century: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=contamination&... (Care to guess what happened in the early 1980s?)

I'm actually a little worried about this. Of course, I'm happy it'll boost interest in vaccine development. But the terror and fear in reaction to AIDS led to a general biosecurity obsession that became biosecurity paranoia and then hysteria and then a renewal of persecution of homosexual men for a couple decades. Who says we'll be immune to the worse effects of fear, paranoia and panic this time around?