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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 had linked the coronavirus outbreak to laboratory research activities in Wuhan, China. Despite initial media reluctance over a lab origin for the coronavirus, officials now agree that the lab origin is both possible and probable.
More recently, I concluded that based on the story of the last global coronavirus pandemic of 1889, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus causing the current COVID-19 pandemic) would eventually spread. transform into one of the many viruses in the common cold family.
Now, there is more evidence that Legal Insurrection has been ahead of the news of the coronavirus pandemic. Professor Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, recently said the virus could resemble the common cold by the spring of next year, as vaccines and exposure boost immunity of a person against the virus.
He added that the country “has turned to the worst” and that things “should be fine” once the winter has passed, adding that there was continued exposure to the virus even among those vaccinated.
Meanwhile, Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel also said on Monday that the coronavirus pandemic could be over in a year, as increased vaccine production secures global supply.
Additionally, Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, the creator of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, says COVID-19 is unlikely to mutate into a more deadly variant and eventually develop into a cold.
Reducing fears of a new, more deadly variant, she said viruses tend to “become less virulent as they circulate” in the population, the Daily Mail reported.
“There is no reason to think that we will have a more virulent version of SARS-CoV-2” because “there are not many places the virus can go to have something that will escape it. ‘immunity but that will always be a truly infectious virus,’ Gilbert reportedly said.
… SARS-CoV-2 will eventually become like the coronaviruses that circulate widely and cause the common cold, Gilbert said.
“We are already living with four different human coronaviruses that we never really think about and SARS-CoV-2 will eventually be one of them,” Gilbert said, during a speech at a Royal Society of Medicine seminar.
While this is good news, it needs to be tempered by the fact that public health officials are now accustomed to both the limelight and plentiful funding.
On Wednesday, she told the public she was “waiting” for funding to study vaccines against other infectious diseases.
Work needs to be done to prepare for future pandemics, she warned, adding that small investments now could potentially save billions of pounds in the long run.
[Dame Sarah Gilbert] agreed that the lack of investment from governments and other sources of research funding shows that they have not learned lessons about the importance of pandemic preparedness.
“We are still trying to raise funds to develop other vaccines that we were working on before the pandemic against diseases that have caused epidemics in the past and will cause epidemics in the future – the Nipah virus, the fever virus de Lassa and the Coronavirus Mers were three who I work and still try to fundraise to work.
I think we would benefit from focusing more on treatments for COVID19, as well as having more control over where the National Institute of Health decides to fund studies … especially those involving gain-of-function research.
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