https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-could-have-universal-covid-v…
It’s hard to say exactly how much COVID matters in a highly vaccinated population (as now exists in most developed countries), but four considerations stand out.
1-Covid still makes a lot of people sick.
2-Death rates are down but still people die from Covid. Vaccine efficacy is waning-95% to 85%.
3-It is hard to estimate long Covid numbers & effect.
4-Variants arestill occurring
Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech are working on “bivalent” vaccines that combine original COVID spike proteins with those from Omicron. These will help remedy the structurally silly situation that prevails today, where we’re vaccinating people with a COVID variant that was outcompeted a long time ago (early 2021). While there are nuances (Omicron appears to generate less cross-immunity than the original strain), updating the spikes as is currently proposed will almost certainly yield better immunity against current COVID variants.
While these updated vaccines will buy us time, they’re unlikely to be a panacea. Moderna and Pfizer recently announced that their bivalent vaccine candidates have roughly 3x lower neutralizing efficacy against BA.4/5 (the current variants) than they do against BA.1 (original Omicron). These results are consistent with other data showing that BA.4/5 possess potent immune escape, even in people who were infected with the original Omicron variant. So, vaccinating people with BA.1 spikes probably won’t end this thing – nor, most likely, will any polyvalent combination of spikes from particular variants.
COVID will very likely continue to mutate and cause problems until we create vaccines that inhibit transmission (which probably means nasal/mucosal membrane vaccines) and vaccines that confer better overall immunity across all COVID-19 variants.2
The author indicates that obtaining a pan-variant will takes several years under the existing FDA rules. He suggest another Warp Speed approach that could yield such a vaccine the year’s end.
It is intellectually internally consistent to believe that COVID doesn’t matter and that we consequently shouldn’t care about any of this. But it is not consistent to think that COVID matters and that this situation is anything other than crazy.