Post by Atticus Pizzaballa on May 17, 2022 11:22:58 GMT -5
Future COVID variants will likely reinfect us multiple times a year, experts say — unless we invest in new vaccines
Yahoo NewsANDREW ROMANO
May 17, 2022, 5:19 AM
For more than a year now, the original COVID-19 vaccines have held up remarkably well — even miraculously so — against a Greek alphabet of new variants: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.
But now experts say something is changing. Since the start of 2022, the initial version of Omicron, known as BA.1, has been spinning off new sublineages — BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4, BA.5 — at an alarming pace.
Earlier variants did this too. But it never really mattered, because their offshoots “had no functional consequence,” according to Eric Topol, founder of Scripps Research Translational Institute. “They did not increase transmissibility or pathogenicity.”
Today’s rapidly proliferating Omicron mutants are different, however. They all have one worrisome trait in common: They’re getting better and better at sidestepping immunity and sickening people who were previously shielded by vaccination or prior infection.
The virus, in other words, is now evolving faster — and in a more consequential way — than ever before. Given the increasing speed of immune evasion, and what this pattern portends for the future, experts warn that the time has come to rethink our reliance on the vaccine status quo and double down on next-generation vaccines that can actually stop infection.
A computer-generated image of multiple copies of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. (Getty Image
“As difficult [as] it is to mentally confront, we must plan on something worse than Omicron in the months ahead,” Topol wrote on May 15. “We absolutely need an aggressive stance to get ahead of the virus — for the first time since the pandemic began — instead of surrendering.”
The brewing storm of BA sublineages isn’t all bad news. COVID cases have been rising nationwide since the beginning of April, nearly quadrupling over the last six weeks to more than 90,000 per day on average. Yet both COVID deaths (about 300 per day) and ICU patients (about 2,000 total) are still at or approaching record lows — even though other countries with bigger gaps in previous exposure or vaccination have been hit hard, and even though new research shows that Omicron and its spinoffs are not, in fact, intrinsically less severe or deadly than prior variants, contrary to early assumptions.
Clearly, existing immunity is still valuable. Along with new therapeutics like Paxlovid, it’s the major factor that makes 2022 different, and much less deadly, than 2021 or 2020.
A skeptic might say that’s all that matters. A low rate of death and severe disease? Mission accomplished, the argument goes. COVID really is no worse than the flu now. Americans are right to unmask and return to normal.
The problem with this approach is that it ignores the virus’s new direction — and what science can do to redirect it. It succumbs to a complacency that could, in time, become deadly itself.
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Encouraging news, not!!
