The best way to avoid future variants is to vaccinate the world

The Delta variant changed the fight against Covid-19 in the United States. Prior to its widespread use, cases were on a clear downtrend, especially in highly vaccinated areas of the country. Most vaccinated people were beginning to forget about Covid-19 altogether and seem to be able to return to their lives.

Currently, the number of cases is increasing rapidly even in vaccinated areas, and the CDC recommends that even vaccinated people return to indoor masking, which may stop Americans from thinking about Covid-19. It seems that the day when it can be done is still far away.

That’s bad enough. America’s global health policy is deteriorating the country.

In low-income countries Only 1% of people have been vaccinated, And there is essentially no access to the mRNA vaccine that works best for Delta. Covax, an international effort to provide vaccines to countries in need, I had a hard time Due to funding and supply issues. Failure to vaccinate the world could be the basis for an even worse turnaround in the pandemic. The emergence of new variants that are more infectious and in some cases even more deadly.

New variants of the coronavirus can occur whenever the virus can occur Infects humans and proliferates in the human body.. The encouraging news is that the virus constantly mutates, but most of those mutations are meaningless and not harmful. However, if you roll the dice enough, that is, if you give the virus a good chance, the virus can mutate to make Covid-19 worse.

The world is repeatedly rolling dice due to global health policies that do not give sufficient priority to vaccination. You don’t have to do that. Vaccinations worldwide are achievable and even affordable. One quote The total cost will be between $ 50 billion and $ 70 billion. This is small compared to the new surge victims. Such global campaigns dramatically reduce the chances of new variants arriving.

Humanitarian and moral failures are not the only failure of the United States to take leadership in that regard. As Delta shows, it’s also incredibly short-sighted and terrible for the safety of America’s own health.

Variant, description

To understand why it is essential to vaccinate as many people as possible to prevent new and deadly variants, it may be worth a brief explanation of how the variants occur. Hmm.

When a virus infects someone, the cells are forced to make billions of copies of the RNA that makes up the genetic code. In the case of Covid-19, it is estimated that the body of an infected person may eventually produce it. 1 to 100 billion copies of coronavirus..

Well, the copy process is not perfect, and almost all of those billions of copies differ from the parent virus in some small details.

In most cases, these differences (caused by copy errors) are ineffective or reduce the effectiveness of the virus infecting people. The metaphor may help explain why: Imagine you have a book. The most likely random transposition of letters makes the book worse.Transpose of letters to make books better Very rare.

The most likely changes to Covid-19 RNA are probably bad for the virus with the mutation, or simply irrelevant. In the early days of the pandemic, there were many panics about variants that turned out to be relatively harmless. There was no particular difference from the original SARS-CoV-2.

Ultimately, however, unlucky rolls can result in random changes in the Covid-19 genome, making the immunoprotection provided by the vaccine more contagious, toxic, or evasive.

“Keeping the case very high increases the chances of hitting the jackpot sooner or later,” said molecular epidemiologist Emma Hodcroft. I told my colleague Brian Lesnick.. “When we keep the case very high, we keep rolling the die.”

The unlucky “jackpot” so far is Delta.It seems there is Excellent for latching to human cells, And it is much more contagious.There is Also, some preliminary evidence Its delta is good at evading the immune response, making it more susceptible to infection in people who have already experienced Covid-19.

When that random change occurred, the virus with its lucky advantage was able to reproduce the virus without it. The delta variant began as one random mutation in one Covid-19 patient. Currently, most new Covid-19 cases in the United States are estimated to be delta, Detected in 98 countries.

Bad Delta. It may be worse.

“The scary scenario is that this isn’t the last or most harmful variant,” said Maureen Miller, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Columbia University. Told Vox..

In fact, there are many ways things can get worse.

First of all, future variants can be more contagious. “This virus surprised us a lot,” said Aris Katzourakis, a virologist at Oxford University. Told the BBC.. “The fact that it occurs twice every 18 months and the two strains (alpha and delta) are each 50% more contagious is a phenomenal amount of change,” he said. He said it was “ridiculous” to try to estimate how much infectivity could be obtained, but we say we can see a big leap in future transmission.

Wendy Berkeley, a virologist at Imperial College London, told the BBC: Coronavirus R0 (a measure of the number of people infected in a single infected case in a non-immune population) was estimated to be 2-3 for the original SARS-CoV-2 virus. R0 of the delta can be up to 8.

“Measles is between 14 and 30,” Berkeley added. Measles, however, is an unusual outlier in infectious diseases. However, Delta is beginning to enter the outlier region itself, and at least it is worth considering what the more contagious variants of the future will look like.

What if the future variants of the coronavirus are as bad as measles? According to the CDC Measles is so infectious that the virus lives in the airspace and can infect new people for up to two hours after the infected person leaves. When a person is infected, up to 90 percent of their close contact is also infected (assuming none of them are immune). Infected people can also spread measles to others up to four days before symptoms appear, making contact tracing nearly impossible.

There is another thing that can get worse. Existing mRNA vaccines work very well against deltas. They are not perfect, but they seem to dramatically reduce the chance of getting infected after Covid-19 (current estimates). 80-90 percent (For infectious diseases), as well as the risk of hospitalization death. So far, most of their benefits have withstood all mutants, even though other vaccines have proven to be much less effective.

Therefore, vaccination is the best tool for fighting the virus. But if developed countries are doing too much, they can end up with variants that blunt their tools. “The emergence of future mutants that can escape vaccine-induced immunity” is possible, former CDC director Tom Frieden Claim..

In particular, mRNA vaccines appear to elicit a very strong and powerful immune response in multiple parts of the immune system.many Virgologists claim The virus is unlikely to escape it, but it remains highly infectious. However, when trillions of dice are rolled, the virus can trip over the immune response.

“This scenario is more likely to occur as the uncontrolled spread around the world continues,” says Frieden.

How can vaccination of the world prevent the emergence of future variants?

In high-income countries, on average, 51% of people are vaccinated.In low-income countries, only 1.36% have..

The humanitarian case of immunizing the world is very clear. Social distance and masking are often inadequate to contain delta variants, and even countries that have previously been able to avoid Covid-19 are now being criticized. New waves are crushing Countries such as Indonesia, South Africa and Malaysia.

Official estimates indicate that 4 million people worldwide have died from Covid-19. But measuring mortality tells the story of even worse victims.One recent estimate is about 4-5 million people died in Covid-19 In india Alone — Most of them last month and a half Delta swept the country..

Vaccines will save millions of lives, directly by protecting people from serious cases of Covid-19 and indirectly by preventing the spread of the virus.

However, the most effective vaccine against delta is that of mRNA. Difficult to manufacture compared to other vaccines such as AstraZeneca and Sinofarm available outside the United States.

So far, the rich world has been reluctant to take small steps to ensure universal access to vaccines.Biden administration Asked to waive the intellectual property rights of the vaccineBut other countries are against it, and experts say that even if the rights are waived, it doesn’t change much.

“It’s okay to waive a vaccine patent, but unless it’s actually tied to the process of increasing vaccine supply, it’s nothing more than expressing thoughts and prayers after the tragedy,” said sociologist Covid. -19 Commentator Zeynep Tufekci Written in may, Encourage the government to do more to actually immunize the world.

What is really needed is funding, large pre-orders of the doses needed to vaccinate the world, and coordinated efforts to ensure that those doses reach everyone in the world. If you build a factory to discharge vaccines on that scale, Help the world in the next pandemic..

If saving the lives of millions of people around the world is not enough to motivate the United States to do so, the case from self-interest will probably be stronger. Already, Delta has delayed the return to normal that Americans have been waiting for, killing thousands of people. The world cannot afford another variant that could get worse.

In comparison, $ 50 billion to $ 70 billion What you need to vaccinate the world is starting to look really cheap. It’s a bargain just because it has the benefit of saving lives. It is even more so as it helps prevent the emergence of future variants.

The rise in Delta after such a promising spring in the United States emphasizes the fact that many Americans may have forgotten in good vaccine news at home: this is still Americans It is a very global crisis that is not exempt. The United States needs to act accordingly.