So there is no way to throw a net around Covid-19 and get caught up in nothing; its animal hosts will always offer it an escape hatch. However, it is not helpful to think of alternative hosts before all the potential human victims of a disease have been protected by vaccination – and so far we are not close. As long as people somewhere in the world are still waiting for their first shots, Covid-19 will have human hosts to reproduce in. And also, possibly, to mutate, creating the kind of variants that are now appearing around the world.
This increases the possibility that, as the virus changes, we will have to constantly tamper with vaccines to keep up with it. “I think most people feel that it’s likely for the next few years that we’ll get a Covid-19 shot,” Alex Gorsky, the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson, told a CNBC event earlier this month said. “Exactly what that shot is going to consist of, I do not know we know today.”
If Covid can not be a disease, we try to express quickly – such as eliminating vaccines to prevent the outbreak of Ebola, it must become a disease we are planning for, such as measles and influenza. With measles, we start vaccinating in childhood. With the flu, we vaccinate again each year, while the content of the vaccine is adjusted to keep up with viral evolution. We vaccinate against those who demand such a toll. In the past ten years, flu in the U.S. has killed about 12,000 to 61,000 people a year; worldwide, measles kills 140,000 each year.
We have no guarantee that Covid-19, if it becomes endemic, will be as wild as measles, or will soften to something soft. Before the pandemic began, there were six coronaviruses that infected humans: the original 2003 SARS; MERS, which originated in 2012; and four that cause seasonal illnesses. The last four, now considered endemic, are responsible for about 25 percent of the colds we catch each winter, and they show that some coronaviruses can become something we do not like but do not have to fear. (However, it was not always mild. One of them was recently linked to a global epidemic in 1889 and 1890 of respiratory diseases and neurological problems; it has historically been called the “Russian flu” – but the name was a guess because these flu viruses were only identified 40 years later.)
A recent article describing the potential future of the new coronavirus, written by postdoc Jennie Lavine of Emory University, attempts to predict the ways in which Covid-19 may act in the future, based on data collected from the four endemic coronaviruses, plus SARS and MERS. . It is found that Covid-19 can reach the state that the four endemic strains now occupy, and that it usually causes a mild illness, but that the outcome depends on how the circulatory disease behaves in children during their first infections, as it the first is. infections that set the immune system to respond along the way.
This, of course, is the same function that vaccines perform. Our bodies create various types of immunity in response to pathogens; Lavine says it is too early to gather the long-term data we need to know whether Covid-19 vaccination and infection in children are so protected that any subsequent infections produce only mild illnesses.
But now assume that the virus does not become a mild infection such as a cold, but remains unpredictably dangerous. This prospect makes it more urgent to defuse vaccine nationalism and to distribute doses worldwide as quickly as possible, not only to protect people from disease, but to deprive the virus of the hosts in which it can mutate.