A Vaccine Resistant Variant by Spring? Omicron Updates!

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Vaccine Demand Grows in US and so do wait times

It is good that more people are getting vaccinated

Britian has detected about 160 Omicron cases

Omicron could dominate our caseloads by January

Georgetown medical professor and immunologist predicts there will be a fully vaccine-resistant COVID variant by the spring

He noted that since the beginning of the pandemic, the U.S. has lagged about a month behind Northern Europe and Israel, areas that are highly vaccinated but still experiencing rising rates of infection, hospitalizations, and deaths. On the bright side, the U.S. is offering booster shots whereas those regions are not—so we might catch up, but the forecast for the holiday season doesn’t look great.

“The faster we get boosted, the better off we’ll be for the next couple of months,” he said. “Sadly, every prediction I’ve made has pretty much come true. I hope I’m wrong this time, but I think by March, April, May, we will have a fully vaccine-resistant variant. There’s simply no way you can have such low rates of vaccination around the world with the virus ping-ponging between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. I’m an immunologist. The probability of us seeing a vaccine-resistant strain is very high.”

A positive aspect to the pandemic, he said, is that technological advances are reducing the cost and difficulty of producing mRNA vaccines: “There’s a lot of investment now in the making of the product that could really disrupt everything so that you could have production all over the world relatively easily in the next couple of years. That could have a significant disruption in the whole biotech pharmaceutical industry. Because if you don’t need big global pharmaceutical companies anymore to solve these problems, we could see a really exciting disruption that could radically change where we’re going. That’s one silver lining in all of this potential.”

To sum up his thoughts on the future of the pandemic, Dybul offered three scenarios. The first is that it “peters out” like the Spanish flu of 1918–19. That’s a long shot because, unlike then, the world is so mobilized and transmission is exponentially easier for the virus. The second is that advancements in therapies and prophylaxes will help the wealthier areas of the world, while the virus remains in poorer nations. “Rich countries are going to do just fine because we’ll have all these products available, and then we’ll have endemicity in lower-income countries, and that’s what’s really going to drive constant variants,” he said. “It’ll become like influenza. We’ll have every year or twice a year therapies, vaccinations, prophylactic treatments, and we’ll be fine. We’ll have some people dying and getting sick and breaking through, but we’ll be fine.” 

Dybul saved the most dire hypothetical outcome for last. “The third possibility is that it’s a mess for the foreseeable future everywhere because the virus will mutate so much that it will even get around therapies,” he said. “That’s really unlikely. I think we’re probably headed towards the middle scenario, but it’s gonna take two to three years to get there. In between could be pretty rough.”

Note that this was in Fortune, obviously aimed at CEOs who have to plan for worst cases. It was published on November 16 before all the news about the highly mutated omicron variant.