- the Omicron wave would come to an end
- providing a better model for the American experience of the variant
- The first studies were conducted on a synthetic virus
The six medical experts close to the White House published three op-eds in the Journal of the American Medical Association, arguing that the time had come for a new approach to the pandemic—one that sets aside the campaign for eradication in favor of living with the disease, reports The New Yorker.
Faucci’s views
Lately, Faucci had been dropping some hints that his view might not be too different from that of the JAMA experts: on ABC last Sunday, he’d said that it might make sense at some point to focus not on covid cases but on hospitalizations, a change that would organize policy around the medical effort to identify and treat the very sick rather than a social campaign to stop the spread of the disease.
But eventually the Omicron wave would come to an end, and the sheer contagiousness of the past two waves, combined with the vaccination campaign, would leave a broad protective “immunological memory,” as Fauci put it, throughout the population.
“Then you start to think about what being infected means regarding closing down indoor events, impact on the economy, impact on travel, impact on schools.” At that point, he said, if there are very few hospitalizations compared with the number of cases, “the impact on society should be measured not on how many people are blowing their nose but on how many people are really getting sick.”
Providing a better model
This week, Fauci said, he was watching the situation in London, which he thought might provide a better model for the American experience of the variant. In late December, London hospital admissions were increasing by as much as fifteen per cent a day, but that rate has since dropped dramatically.
“Sometimes you have a sawtooth—it goes up and then it looks like it comes down, but then it goes back up again. So, if London does that, that’s what I’m really keeping my eye on,” he said. If the peak in London turned out to be real, I asked, how would he feel about the American wave? “Absolutely more optimistic,” Fauci said.
The new normal
Fauci, in other words, sounded far more hesitant than the JAMA experts to declare a “new normal.” There were, he said, “too many unknowns.” We don’t know the number of people in the country with no experience of the virus—who haven’t been vaccinated or infected. We also don’t know what level of protection an Omicron infection might provide against the next variant.
“Because we will undoubtedly get a next variant,” he said.
“A ‘new normal with COVID’ in January 2022 is not living without COVID-19,” Ezekiel Emanuel, of the University of Pennsylvania, Celine Gounder, of N.Y.U., and Michael Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota, wrote. But they believed that the long era of emergency—the one defined by a wartime feeling and frequent briefings from Anthony Fauci—should draw to a close.
The war-room phase in White House before Christmas
A daily deputies meeting was established at 8 a.m., in which “our white coats,” as one Administration official described Fauci and the other leading medical advisers, analyzed the newest data on the disease.
Five interagency “work streams” were established, two of them devoted to mapping the evolution of the disease and the other three to organizing the provision of needed supplies: one for vaccines, another for therapeutics, the last for tests.
About the first study on the virus
The first studies, even before samples of the variant could be examined in a lab, were conducted on a synthetic virus, and they gave the scientists an early indication that the vaccines and boosters were likely to work, a finding that was borne out by the eventual laboratory research.
In those early days, O’Connell said, her team was also talking with pharmaceutical manufacturers about how long it would take to craft a new vaccine if one were needed, and to test what she called the “medicine cabinet”—the set of therapeutics, most essentially monoclonal antibodies, that the government was buying.
The news there wasn’t so good. Two of the three monoclonal antibodies proved ineffective against Omicron, leaving just one, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline.
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Source : The New Yorker
