Last week, New York provided a worrying detail of what is happening in the Brazilian city of Manaus, whose population was previously thought to have developed extensive protection against the virus last year, only to find itself facing another major outbreak. There are theories about how this happened – the immunity of the community being overestimated, the protection of antibodies decreasing, the variant becoming more transmissible or, perhaps most worrying, the virus adapting to avoid the antibodies.
In any case, an increasing number of variants such as Brazil’s could theoretically delay the final game. Axios In slightly different terms – the current pandemic may be almost over, but the variants may trigger others.
Several vaccines have been shown to work well against the main coronavirus strain, and the most transmissible British variant also appears to be quite susceptible to them, but the South African variant appears more resistant. AND, New York notes, even a slight drop in efficacy could prevent “population-scale protection only through vaccination.”
The New York Times, however, explains that reports on vaccine effectiveness often do not tell the whole story. Scientifically speaking, vaccine research considers any transmission to be a failure, but that may not be the most important thing. Novavax and Johnson & Johnson provided data that showed that their vaccine candidates did not prevent infections in South Africa as well as elsewhere, but have still been very successful in preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death. This suggests a possible scenario in which vaccines reduce coronavirus to a much milder pathogen.
But that may still not be enough globally, for New York. Even though vaccines significantly reduce the worst results from COVID-19, the world’s poorest countries are not expected to achieve mass immunization by 2024, so while the tide may turn more rapidly in the United States, the global pandemic may still ongoing in the coming years, especially if the variants impede the herd’s natural immunity. Read more at New York, Axios, and The New York Times.
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Originally published