If you do not vaccinate yourself, vaccinate your loved ones and the community as this is a very difficult situation.
The other thing to emphasize is that I don’t know if the Omicron variant will replace the Delta variant. But I think it’s possible. Could that be a good thing? Possibly if it leads to milder disease than we see with the Delta variant. But anyway, you will still get infected if you are not vaccinated.
BERGEN: Can the pandemic continue indefinitely? We have been almost two years on it in the US.
REVIEW: I see this through the lens of evolution. Early in the pandemic, I expected this to last at least 18 months. That’s because the only real perspective I have to understand what this coronavirus might look like is past flu pandemics. And I think many of us have assumed that at some point it will become a seasonal infection like the flu after two years or so.
Earlier this year, I woke up in March and April rudely to the arrival of the new Alpha variant as well as the Beta and Gamma variants, and I had a feeling that this was going to change the way the pandemic went. will take place. As a result, I think some of the darkest days of the pandemic are ahead of us, and that’s at a time in the spring when case numbers are falling markedly in the United States and vaccines are flowing. But I realized that variations were like 210 mph curveballs, and we couldn’t predict whether they would increase transmission or the potential to cause severe disease. This conclusion is not favored by many of my colleagues and policymakers.
BERGEN: Do you have a theory as to why Delta emerged first in India?
So there is no predictability as to why or where Covid will take root.
If I can understand why surges happen or why they go away or why they don’t, then I’ll be in a better place to answer questions about where Covid is headed. All I can tell you is that when a spike starts, the level of vaccination has a huge impact on the amount of pain and suffering that comes with that spike.
BERGEN: Travel bans for South Africa and other African countries – do they help?
A “travel ban” is something countries might do initially just to lock things down while they understand what’s going on – it’s by no means a permanent solution. It’s like the police at a crime scene. They locked it for a few hours to gather information and then reopened it.
The political backlash of implementing a travel ban is not helpful in most cases. If it gives you 24 to 36 hours to at least understand what’s going on, then I think it might help. But if it continues after that, especially when you already have widespread spread of the virus in other parts of the world, it will backfire.
REVIEW: I based my estimate at the time on historical data from previous pandemics.
The reality is that you can’t model more than 30 days. Just look at what’s happening right now. We cannot even predict why these surges will happen or when they will happen. Who, 30 days ago, could have developed a model that could accurately predict what we’re seeing right now with Omicron? Who could have predicted that?
BERGEN: Do we know how deadly the Omicron variant is compared to the earlier variants?
REVIEW: It’s still early, but I believe Omicron is less toxic than Delta. This variant is being studied in South Africa, which is important because the virus has persisted in that country longer than others. And we know that hospitalizations, severe illnesses and deaths are lagging indicators. Rates usually go up two to three weeks after the increase in case the numbers start to happen. But to this day, epidemiological and clinical data on Omicron cases around the world support the virus to be less deadly than Delta.
BERGEN: How necessary are boosters?
REVIEW: When we first worked on a Covid-19 vaccine, we had to prioritize the safety of the vaccine, which is already well done. But we never really understood how best to use vaccines in terms of dose numbers, dose intervals, even dose amounts to maximize our immune response both in the short and long term. . We know that sometimes the best immune response occurs when you have a long time between doses; in other words, allowing the immune system to recover from this baseline and potentially respond to this enhanced boost with the next dose. Let’s see how many vaccination schedules we have in that case.
The whole world should have access to three doses of the Covid mRNA vaccine, and it wouldn’t be more tragic for me to have someone protected by a two-dose regimen for six to eight months, and then fall seriously ill. and died because they didn’t get a booster. I think one day this won’t even be a question. It will be a minimal three-dose vaccine.
REVIEW: Two things: One is that this pandemic has really opened the door to expanding our global vaccine capacity in a way that nothing else has done before.
I think there were some complications as to what the problem was. For example, we constantly hear about technology transfer and giving these countries the ability to manufacture their own vaccines, yet the expertise required to manufacture these vaccines is really at a premium. high. It’s hard to find people who know how to do this. So it is not enough to transfer technology to a low-income country if you do not provide the expertise to produce these vaccines. It’s not as simple as making chicken soup.
Also, our focus is almost exclusively on vaccinating everyone in the world, which is certainly important. But we haven’t thought enough about turning a vaccine into a vaccine, what the needle in the arm would take. We’ve seen challenges in this country with vaccination management, and those challenges exist around the world as well.
So shipping just a few pallets of vaccine to a low-income country could be a futile endeavor if, in fact, they don’t have the infrastructure to deliver the vaccine and they don’t have the means to do so. to help people understand. how and why they should want to be immunized. This whole situation has highlighted the fact that we have a lot of work to do to understand not only how to make vaccines, but also how to turn vaccines into vaccinations.
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