Citation:
Abstract:
Most people are trying to put the COVID-19 pandemic, with all it tragedies, disruptions, uncertainties, and inanities in the rear view mirror. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 global health emergency over on May 5th, and the U.S declared the public health emergency over on May 11th. Budget realities mean that governments and public health agencies are scaling down testing, with WHO recently estimating a 90 percent reduction in global COVID-19-related variant testing and reporting compared to levels in November 2021 during the Omicron variant outbreak.
Yet, the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19 keeps evolving. Natural evolutionary mechanisms ensure that genetic mutations and changes keep creating new variants.
Not that every new variant is potentially more transmissible or lethal (in fact, most are not), but the combination of greatly reduced testing and sequencing combined with the evolution of highly mutated variants like the BA.2.86 variant discovered in July 2023 indicates a need to potentially shift vaccine strategies that have been primarily oriented to protecting against specific widely circulating variants. (read more and download pdf copy here)