How Worried Should We Be About the Variants?
by Dr Michael Yeadon and Marc Girardot As the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic continues across the globe, many genetic modifications have started to appear in the virus. These are being sequenced, analysed1 and monitored by many scientists. This well known phenomenon occurs continuously for Influenza as well as for coronaviruses. Health authorities and mainstream media have been very wary of supposed heightened risk profiles of these new variants. They are also adamant about a potential risk of evasion from immunity, whether that immunity was acquired via infection or vaccination. Some evolutionary virologists consider that viruses ‘attenuate’, or evolve towards less virulent forms. Some feel that novel pharmaceutical2 and non-pharmaceutical interventions3 – or specific circumstances4 – could possibly disrupt this evolutionary process and favour a more severe variant or threaten acquired immunity. The recent downward trends5 in cases and in hospitalisations across the globe seem to indicate that the virus has probably not mutated in any way that would make it much more dangerous and that a healthy immune system is very capable of dealing with these new forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Indeed, patients have been shown to recover naturally in most instances just like they did from the original form of COVID-19.6 The paucity of confirmed re-infections with the virus, accompanied by clinical symptoms, despite hundreds of millions of infections over ...
