Legal Insurrection was among the first to inform our readers of the COVID outbreak in China on January 10, 2020.
Less than two months later, I reported that Chinese researchers linked the coronavirus outbreak to laboratory research activities in Wuhan, China. Despite the initial media-led push-back on a lab origin for the coronavirus, officials are now agreeing that lab origin is both possible and probable.
Most recently, I concluded that based on the history of the last global coronavirus pandemic of 1889, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus causing the current COVID-19 pandemic) would eventually morph into one of the many viruses in the common cold family.
Now there is more proof that Legal Insurrection has been ahead of the coronavirus pandemic news. Professor Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, recently said the virus could resemble the common cold by spring next year as vaccines and exposure boost a person’s immunity to the virus.
He added the country “is over the worst” and things “should be fine” once winter has passed, adding that there was continued exposure to the virus even in people who are vaccinated.Meanwhile, Moderna’s chief executive Stéphane Bancel also said on Monday that the coronavirus pandemic could be over in a year as increased vaccine production ensures global supplies.
Additionally, Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, the creator of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, asserts that COVID-19 is unlikely to mutate into a deadlier variant and will eventually end up as a common cold.
Cutting down fears of a more deadly new variant, she said that viruses tend to “become less virulent as they circulate” through the population, Daily Mail reported.”There is no reason to think we will have a more virulent version of SARS-CoV-2″, as “there aren’t very many places for the virus to go to have something that will evade immunity but still be a really infectious virus”, Gilbert was quoted as saying….SARS-CoV-2 will eventually become like the coronaviruses which circulate widely and cause the common cold, Gilbert said.”We already live with four different human coronaviruses that we don’t really ever think about very much and eventually SARS-CoV-2 will become one of those,” said Gilbert, while speaking at a seminar of the Royal Society of Medicine
While this is good news, it must be tempered by the reality that public health officials are now used to both the limelight and copious funding.
On Wednesday, she told the audience that she is “waiting” for funding to look into vaccines for other infectious diseases.
Work must be done to prepare for future pandemics, she warned, adding that small amounts of investment now could potentially save billions of pounds in the long run.[Dame Sarah Gilbert] agreed that the lack of investment from governments and other research funding sources shows they have not learned lessons about the importance of pandemic preparedness.“We’re still trying to raise funds to develop other vaccines that we were working on before the pandemic against diseases that have caused outbreaks in the past and will cause outbreaks in the future – Nipah virus, lassa fever virus and Mers coronavirus were three that I’m working on and still trying to raise funds to work on.”
I believe that we would benefit from more focus on treatments for COVID19, as well as more controls on where the National Institute of Health decides to fund studies…especially those involving gain-of-function research.
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