So there’s no way to launch a network around Covid-19 and squeeze it into anything; your pet guests will always provide you with an escape hatch. However, it is not really helpful to start thinking about alternative hosts until all potential human victims of a disease have been protected by vaccination, and so far we are not close. While people around the world are still waiting for the first shots, the Covid-19 will have human hosts to breed on. And also, potentially, mutate, creating the kind of variants that now appear all over the world.
This increases the possibility that as the virus changes, we need to keep playing with vaccines to stay up to date. “I think most people think it’s going to be something that we’re probably going to get a shot of Covid-19 over the next few years,” Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, said earlier this month at a CNBC. “I think exactly what this plan will consist of. I don’t think we know today.”
If Covid cannot be a disease, we try to crush it quickly (the way, for example, to deploy vaccines to fight Ebola outbreaks), it must become a disease that we have planned, such as measles and grip. With measles, we start vaccinating from childhood. With the flu, we revaccinate annually, while adjusting the contents of the vaccine to keep abreast of viral evolution. We vaccinate against these because they spend a lot of toll. In the last ten years, the flu has killed between 12,000 and 61,000 people a year in the U.S.; worldwide, measles kills 140,000 each year.
We have no guarantee that if Covid-19, if it becomes endemic, it will be as fierce as measles or become mild. Before the pandemic began, there were six coronaviruses known to infect humans: the original 2003 SARS; MERS, emerged in 2012; and four that cause seasonal illnesses. These last four, which are now considered endemic, are responsible for 25% of the colds we contract each winter and show that some coronaviruses can become something we don’t like, but don’t need to fear. (They have not always been mild. One of them has recently been linked to a global epidemic in 1889 and 1890 of respiratory diseases and neurological problems; it went down in history as the “Russian flu”), but this name was a assumption for its cause, as influenza viruses were not identified until 40 years later.)
A recent article on the potential future of the new coronavirus, written by Emory University postdoctoral fellow Jennie Lavine, attempts to predict the ways in which Covid-19 might behave in the future, based on data collected from the four endemic coronaviruses. plus SARS and MERS. . He finds that Covid-19 could reach the state now occupied by the four endemic strains, which causes a mostly mild disease on a regular basis, but this result will depend on how the circulating disease behaves in children during the first infections. they are the first infections that make up the immune system to respond to the road.
This is the same function that vaccines perform, of course. Our body creates multiple types of immunity in response to pathogens; it is too early, Lavine says, to gather the long-term data we will need to know if vaccination against Covid-19 and childhood infection protect so that any subsequent infection produces only mild diseases.
But suppose, for the time being, that the virus does not become a mild infection like a cold, but remains an unpredictable disease. This perspective makes it more urgent to disable vaccine nationalism and distribute doses around the world as quickly as possible, not only to protect people from disease, but to deprive the virus of the hosts in which it can mutate.