Opinion: Covid-19 continues to surprise us

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Thu, 2022-07-21 17:21 — John Girard

Opinion: Covid-19 continues to surprise us The million-dollar question is not whether BA.5 will cause a major uptick in infection across the country -- it has, and it will -- but rather whether anyone, including those who have been vaccinated or have developed infection or both, is safe from its voracious reach, writes Kent Sepkowitz. Opinion by Kent Sepkowitz CNN

Here we are two-and-a -half years and many variants into the coronavirus pandemic, and the virus continues to surprise.

Take the recent news about the latest Omicron subvariant, labeled BA.5. According to Eric Topol, a cardiologist and professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, BA.5 is the most transmissible version the virus. It combines more efficient transmission and better immune evasion from previous infection and is driving a slow but steady rise of hospitalizations related to Covid-19 across the United States.

The million-dollar question now is not whether BA.5 (and its companion, the slightly less transmissible BA.4) will cause a major uptick in infection across the country -- it has, and it will -- but rather whether anyone, including those who have been vaccinated or have developed infection or both, is safe from its voracious reach.

The dream, of course, remains a vaccine that can produce a response that could handle any and all variants. It is not clear that such a vaccine is a realistic hope, at least in the short term. Finding a genetic sequence of the coronavirus that both is preserved across all variants and provokes potent antibodies is easy to think about but extremely difficult to develop.

The example of the still-unsuccessful, 35-year pursuit of a vaccine to prevent HIV infection is a reminder that scientific progress is always completely unpredictable.

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