Mutated virus may reinfect people already stricken once with covid-19, sparking debate and concerns
Source: Washington Post
A trial of an experimental coronavirus vaccine detected the most sobering signal yet that people who have recovered from infections are not completely protected against a variant that originated in South Africa and is spreading rapidly, preliminary data presented this week suggests.
The finding, though far from conclusive, has potential implications for how the pandemic will be brought under control, underscoring the critical role of vaccination, including for people who have already recovered from infections. Reaching herd immunity — the threshold when enough people achieve protection and the virus can’t seed new outbreaks — will depend on a mass vaccination campaign that has been constrained by limited supply.
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noted that it appears a vaccine is better than natural infection in protecting people, calling it “a big, strong plug to get vaccinated” and a reality check for people who may have assumed that because they have already been infected, they are immune.
In the placebo group of the trial for Novavax’s vaccine, people with prior coronavirus infections appeared just as likely to get sick as people without them, meaning they weren’t fully protected against the B.1.351 variant that has swiftly become dominant in South Africa. The variant has been detected only a handful of times in the United States, including a case reported Friday in Virginia, which became the third state to identify the presence of the virus variant.
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/mutated-virus-may-reinfect-people-already-stricken-once-with-covid-19-sparking-debate-and-concerns/ar-BB1dqPeT?li=BBnbcA1
This is pretty scary. We can expect that as Americans get vaccinated that Republicans will act like they did with Ebola and criticize Biden's support for funding COVID vaccination efforts in poorer countries. The problem is that as long as COVID continues to spread unchecked that variants will continue to develop, which can come back to haunt the U.S.
Can you imagine if Trump was in office during the Ebola epidemic? Trump would have just blown it off and would have been happy to let it spread in Africa without funding any research efforts until it arrived in the U.S. at which time Trump would have probably denied that it was spreading and claimed that it would go away on its own.
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