News organizations understand all this instinctively. Cable news segments about the vaccine almost all show footage of the vaccine being moved around the country with granular logistical details about the rollout, all of which seem to underscore that, yes, this is happening. Local news channels have their own spin on unboxing videos. “Vaccine delivery unboxing at Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center,” is the title of one video by the Portland Press Herald. There are other clips from Iowa, Minnesota and my home state of Montana.

There’s likely another motivation behind the footage — one intended for those skeptical of or hesitant to take the vaccine. Those who’ve investigated the allure of unboxing videos argue that they appeal to consumers who might be wary of a new product. When an influencer unboxes a gadget or toy or new cosmetic, they are (often, quite literally) tearing through the company’s marketing gloss to reveal the real product. “It’s all very well saying that a laptop is amazing but I’m actually showing that laptop, and as a result I can be trusted a bit more,” the YouTuber behind the gadget reviewing account, Geek Street said in a 2018 interview about the unboxing phenomenon. Google, which owns YouTube, reported in 2014 that “62 percent of people who view unboxing videos do so when researching a particular product” to buy.

If unboxing videos are a Consumer Reports-esque way of building trust, then it makes sense that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo staged his own unboxing video of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine earlier this month. For six minutes he channeled his inner YouTuber pulling apart and explaining the GPS tracking device and thermal monitors that help keep tabs on each package. He took out individual vials to show how each box can hold roughly 5,000 doses. The entire spectacle was intended “just to show you how real it is,” he said.

But for those of us eager to get stabbed and safely join the immunity herd, there’s no marketing happening, here. As Ms. Silcoff wrote in 2014, “these videos seem to come from a more snake-brained place.” Describing her own journey down the unboxing rabbit hole, she suggested that “the root of these videos’ gargantuan success could lie solely in the fact that it feels good to take the plastic off something unused.”

But just because it tickles the lizard brain doesn’t mean there isn’t something deeper, too. Watching the vaccine show up at hospitals or end its journey via rapid deposit into a fleshy patch of upper arm, I feel hope for the first time in a while. Unboxing, at its most elemental, has a hopeful quality to it. It’s exciting, new and full of possibility. Watching the beginning of the end of the pandemic, I am, for the first time, allowing myself to imagine those possibilities — and how good it will feel when we can finally take the plastic off our lives.