Is it inevitable that we will have future COVID variants?

 

You could draw a parallel to the seasonal flu, not in terms of gravity or scale, but in terms of the appearance of variation. Flu vaccine is altered regularly and it’s an effort to attend to the presence of novelty in the pathogen and to prime people before they get exposed to it.

I think in the case of SARS-CoV-2, as the public we’ve been exposed to the idea that there is variation. And it seems rather intimidating? The pathogen that we thought we were familiar with is changing in front of us and the rules of engagement with that pathogen are not stable.

What’s fascinating about COVID-19 is that our best efforts to avoid the disease, the product of SARS-CoV-2 infection, change the game for the virus. It adds complexity to this story because we are keeping selection pressure on that virus, which is doing its best to survive. And, as we know, can replicate and be variable very quickly.

Now we’ve got this very large-scale event where lots of people with lots of copies of virus are around and on top of that we suppress [the virus] with great weight, either by controlling the population or by vaccine. The combination of these events, in my mind, leads to the inevitability of the emergence of new variation.