Closing the Page on Coronavirus

We have come a long and difficult way from the beginning of the pandemic a year ago to vaccines now. The United States spent a great deal of money and gave its best effort to control the pandemic and emerged as the worst in the world. Fortunately, one program, Operation Warp Speed, which provided funds to mitigate risk in vaccine development for private pharmaceutical companies did work very well. After some failures - to be expected in therapeutic research - we have in had two vaccines in this country, with a third from Novavax likely to appear in early summer. There is another in England and probably a third from China. The Russian claims to efficacy for its vaccine are not accepted outside that country. Our domestic vaccine campaigns, using the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna products, are well underway albeit off to a slow start. This probably will become more efficient within a week or two as the system begins to function smoothly.

These vaccines will not eliminate the virus but will produce a herd immunity, probably by mid-summer, that will cause it to become endemic rather than epidemic. The virus will continue to mutate since it is an RNA virus and they are quite mutable. Mutations per se usually are not a therapeutic issue since the mutation must be in the surface protein that is related to uptake of the virus by the human cells to modify its infectivity. They may increase replication speed, increase viral numbers, or otherwise increase dissemination, but that should be manageable through the existing vaccines. Thus far, that appears to be the case.

We seem to be at the beginning of the end or the beginning of a change to endemicity. The latter may require other vaccines, as does influenza annually, but the mystery now has been removed from the virus. All of this is a result of excellent research, development, manufacturing and dissemination of the vaccine in a remarkably short period of time. It truly has been a medical miracle brought about by funding from the US government, the scientific and managerial efforts of private industry, and a background of about twenty years of basic research in coronavirus and other viruses. There is more that could be said in a blog about coronavirus, but nothing that is not in the news media. We have covered the virus during the past year of confusion, discovery, and understanding. There is no reason to persist. Thank you for reading.