Whiplash
Here’s another brief peek at my work in progress…
It turned out that scientists were equally baffled by this pesky disease. Back when the pandemic first emerged, they predicted it would become endemic and never go away.
But their initial dismay turned to pleasure when they discovered that the virus remained stable throughout most of 2020. It seemed not to be mutating toward greater virulence or transmissibility.
They became positively ecstatic in November, when both Pfizer and Moderna’s clinical trials showed that their vaccines were 95% effective. They envisioned they might be able to control Covid-19 through vaccinations like measles, or that it might mutate to become like another flu, deadly but controllable if you kept ahead of it with the right vaccine.
Just before Christmas Pfizer’s chief virologist enthused the vaccines were a breakthrough for humanity. But by January he had changed his tune acknowledging that the rapidly mutating viruses heralded a new chapter where scientists would have to remain vigilant for newer more virulent mutations.
By late February the reigning paradigm had shifted again. Chris Murray who produced closely watched projections about the trajectory of the disease was shocked when saw data that showed that a South African variant of Covid could not only dampen te effects of the existing vaccines but could also avoid the immunity of previously infected patients.
He told a Reuter’s reporter that that he couldn’t sleep wondering when the pandemic would ever end. Te next morning he started to revise his projection model so it would incorporate the new variant’s ability to evade natural immunity. It was a deeply depressing paradigm shift.
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