NASHVILLE, TN – The coronavirus Omicron variant has caught us off guard like the Delta variant did. Businesses have paused plans to bring their workers back in person, eleven states have returned to remote learning, although not in Tennessee.
And high infection rates have forced some universities to shift to remote learning after opening up for in person classes this Fall.
It seems that with COVID the more things change, the more they stay the same. Hospitals are filling up with new COVID patients and medical staff are once again exhausted from taking care of them.
“The COVID vaccinations came out in mid-December last year –the Pfizer, Moderna and J&J vaccines. By February of 2021 the COVID cases in the U.S. plummeted,” said Dr. Dali Fan. He is a researcher at the University of California and a volunteer vaccinator in Elk Grove, California.
Fan said that when the Delta variant came into play, the case counts rose again.
“We fought back with the boosters. Then it came to the more infectious Omicron. And we countered that with vaccinating the 12-16 year olds and then now the 5-11 year olds. So it’s this back and forth and we are not anywhere near the end of the game,” Fan said.
“I think things have not gone the way we wanted them to, to say the least,” said Dr. Tung Nguyen, Endowed Chair in General Internal Medicine and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
A year ago Nguyen thought we might have COVID-19 under control by now. But at almost the two-year mark, he said that we’re a long way from the end.
“Worldwide we’re at 270 million cases and 5.3 million deaths. The U.S. had over 50 million cases and over 800,000 deaths. In other words, we account for about 1 of 5 cases and 1 out 6 deaths in the whole globe, which is way higher than would be expected for our population—which is an indication of how badly we are doing,” Nguyen said.
He noted COVID has killed more Americans in two years than died in all the wars of the last 120 years, including WW1 and WWII.
Internal Medicine and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
“The next wave is already here. We have over 120,000 new cases a day now,” he said. Sixty-eight thousand people have been hospitalized and some experts predict we will see 300,000 new cases a day in the next few months.
People with other crises like heart attacks and strokes will not be getting treated in a timely manner because hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID patients. Nguyen said our health system is stretched thin and many health professionals are leaving and the ones who stay are burnt out and depressed. The news is even worse for the unvaccinated.
“As of October, before the Omicron variant, the risk of getting COVID among the unvaccinated was 5 times higher than those who were fully vaccinated. And the risk of death was 13 times higher for the unvaccinated,” he said.
A bit of good news: 61% of Americans are fully vaccinated. But more bad news about Omicron: two doses of Pfizer or Moderna vaccine are much less effective against it. And that means people will need boosters. Only 31% those 18 or older and 53% of those 65 and older have had their booster shot.
“The more cases we have the more the virus can mutate. And the more mutations there are the more likely that one will come that escapes the current vaccines and treatment,” he said.
Vaccines for smallpox and polio, also caused by viruses, stay in your body forever. That’s how those diseases have been virtually eliminated around the globe. They don’t mutate the way COVID-19 does. The coronavirus is a moving target. The term “fully vaccinated” is a misnomer because people will need boosters to fight off new variants.
Public health experts say the best way to reduce transmission is wearing masks in public and getting everybody vaccinated. Unfortunately, many countries don’t have enough vaccines to do that.
Vaccine inequity is a big problem. President Biden is sending 1 billion doses of MRNA vaccine to poorer countries. China and European countries are, too. But it’s not enough. The solution is to get manufacturers to forget about their patents and partner with scientists in other countries to make their own vaccines locally. That could turn the tide.
Some companies are talking about setting up closed production facilities in other countries but aren’t willing to share their vaccine recipes and the technology to produce them at this point.
“We’ve seen far too much reticence and profit motive from companies to make that happen,” said Peter Maybarduk, Director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Group.
He said that governments are taking the problem seriously but haven’t yet compelled vaccine manufacturers to give up their intellectual property rights to save humanity.
The World Health Organization is setting up a technology transfer hub to share MRNA technology with manufacturers all over the world. Maybarduk said they are starting by copying the Moderna vaccine but it will take a couple of years.
The Moderna vaccine was developed with government funds so it’s not their intellectual property. Even though their recipe is available it’s a highly technical field and requires considerable investment to produce vaccines at scale, especially if you’re starting from scratch.
“Therapeutics, unfortunately, we’re looking at a repeat of the same vaccine dynamic through the first three-quarters of next year. Supply of the Pfizer drug, for example, does not look to be great enough to serve world need and will take until at the second half of next year to get generics on line,” Maybarduk said.
