What will be the long term of COVID-19 and will there be a pandemic?
This is the big consultation of the South to Southwest panel “COVID, Mpox, Disease X, What’s next?”Last week.
Three years ago, Austin, the United States and the world were shutting down. The schools went on spring break and didn’t get back up and running until August. Businesses closed. People running from home and looking to teach their children and grandchildren at home.
Since then, more than 1. 1 million people have died from the disease in the United States, more than 93,000 in Texas and 1,802 in Travis County.
We have moved from the panic phase to the forgetfulness phase,” said Dr. Matthew Hepburn, an infectious disease expert and senior adviser to the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for pandemic awareness. “We’ve all experienced trauma. We got to the end,” Hepburn said.
It’s not really over. Instead of being a COVID-19 pandemic, it is endemic, meaning anything that is provided like the flu. We will continue to bring out new variants,” said Hamilton Bennett, senior director of vaccine access and partnerships at Moderna, which produced an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19.
“It will look like a seasonal flu, with the severity of variants becoming less important,” Bennett said. “We are very smart to respond to variants,” he said.
It may not be a mushroom like in the HBO series inspired by video games, but “in the ultimate sci-fi movies, it’s a pandemic that gets us and, frankly, they’re not wrong,” Hepburn said.
He is now guilty of predicting and preventing the next pandemic. He also worked on the Obama administration’s swine flu epidemic.
There are all sorts of respiratory viruses and other diseases that are being tracked. “Some of them will be as severe as COVID-19, and some of them will be more severe outbreaks,” Hepburn said.
Others will remain remote and not emerge as a global pandemic, Hepburn said, but the person he works for will still have to be aware of all of them.
Bennett and Hepburn said we now know what to do. We have the science to create vaccines very quickly, in a few months, and then increase production to create 30 billion doses in a year. Previously, expansion took 10 to 15 years.
Now, with mRNA generation, once the disease is isolated, we can adapt that generation to code that disease and temporarily create a new vaccine,” Bennett said.
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Hepburn recalls that after the H1N1 swine flu in 2009, other people felt they were satisfied that it was over and that they could simply go about their daily lives. They would no longer have to worry about a pandemic. Fast forward 10 years, and we had COVID-19, which was worse than swine flu and for many other people after 10 years.
“The challenge we have together is to continue to run the well-oiled machine,” Hepburn said. This means looking for the next disease and preserving our ability to boost vaccine production temporarily and on a large scale.
We will need to maintain public attention on infectious diseases and continue to fund their prevention.
One concept that helps keep them up at night is this concept other people have: “We did this because of COVID-19, but we’ll never do it again,” Hepburn said. “We have a lot of obstacles” around ‘I don’t need to think about infectious diseases. ‘”
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In many ways, Monkeypox, now called Mpox, is proof. “We didn’t react as temporarily as we could have, and it’s a disease for which we already had a vaccine, but not enough,” Hepburn said.
“There was some inertia in launching the response,” Hepburn said. “One of the main points was that we relied on state, city and county public conditioning entities to implement the systems and it’s the same government agencies that lost a lot of workers to the pandemic to exhaustion,” Hepburn said. “We can’t just snap our hands and treat Mpox right away and that deserves to be the norm. “
However, the community’s response was reassuring. Personal duty and conversion behaviors slowed this virus as the fitness branch rolled out vaccines.
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We have learned from COVID-19 to stay home if you have health problems or have been exposed. This collective duty has continued in other diseases such as influenza.
COVID-19 also replaced the game, as it has at-home tests that can be done to make sure it doesn’t leave the space sick.
The pandemic has also taught us the importance of volunteering for clinical trials, which tens of thousands of others have done. It also allowed us to talk more about fitness equity and equity in vaccines and clinical trials.
Read more: When will COVID-19 end? How Austin doctors and scientists predict the long-term pandemic
The two dominant theories are: COVID-19 is anything that escaped from a lab or COVID-19 is anything that originated from an animal disease that was transmitted to humans.
Hepburn said we want to oppose either scenario, because either can happen.
The technology can help both to generate pathogens in laboratories and protect laboratory personnel, and to track spaces where animals and humans interact, such as testing poultry personnel for new infections.
“It’s to keep an eye on the right spaces,” Bennett said. “There are occasions of spillage all the time. Most of the time, it will appear bloodless or asymptomatic. “
But we want to be ready when cases of colds or asymptomatic spill, he said. “We can probably get through faster,” he said.
“It’s about speed,” Hepburn said. If you can avoid it in two cases, that’s more than two hundred cases. “
“If we did a vaccine in less than a year, why can’t we do it in 30 days?” asks Hepburn. If we can do it in 30 days, can we do it in 10?”
Can we create a laboratory in a shipping container instead of a construction the length of a football field?If we can do that, we can sell this shipping container lab on a domain where there is an outbreak. Then we can temporarily take a user from an inflamed domain to the composition of the disease; we can expand the disease-mimicking mRNA vaccine and then give shots on the floor before it spreads to other places.
mRNA vaccines are already being developed for malaria, respiratory syncytial virus, and cytomegalovirus, a disease that causes birth defects.
It is possible that mRNA vaccines can only be used against HIV, rare diseases, and cancer at the individual level.
“If we can do it in a box, can we have it in a hospital?” asks Hepburn. On Monday, the hospital can do an individual cancer shot for six other people and on Tuesday, it can make a vaccine for anything else. “
Hamilton says, “We’re in the age of vaccines and mRNA-based therapies, what can’t we do?”