Abstract
As we head into the closing months of 2021, it's fair to say that we are on uncertain ground as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to simmer and boil over in some regions of the U.S. This is a hard pill to swallow for many, who saw the availability and rollout of different vaccines in late winter and early spring as the first steps to ditching masks and returning to restaurants, concerts, and sporting events with a significantly reduced risk to ourselves and those in our community.
But then the Delta variant took hold, and hit especially hard in areas of the country with the double whammy—low rates of masking and low rates of vaccination. As I write this, the upward curve of new infections is very steep and is once again above 100,000 per day and climbing.
Throughout this new spike, reassurances of the effectiveness of the current crop of vaccines against the delta variant have been welcomed by those who've had their shots. Also providing some solace was early thinking that perhaps new variants of the virus were limited to changes in the S protein that encodes the spike protein of the virus.
Unfortunately, that is not the case. As William Haseltine, Ph.D., notes in his regular column on page 43 “We have underestimated COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2, at every turn. At first, we doubted that the troubling news from China was the start of a new pandemic. Then we hoped what passed for border controls would keep it from our shores. We rejected the idea of aerosols transmission for far too long. We believed that as the virus spread, it would weaken and then disappear in the summer months. With the advent of unexpectedly potent vaccines, we declared what now appears to be a premature end to the pandemic.”
Citing new research from Thorne et al. posted on the preprint server bioRxiv in early June, relevant changes to the SARS-CoV-2 virus are not restricted to the spike protein, but also to “preferential expression of virus-encoded immune suppression genes and proteins, in addition to the changes in the spike protein,” as Haseltine writes.
While this effect was observed in the Alpha variant, it should provide a sense of foreboding of the broader adaptability of the virus. This virus's ability to evade the immune system for a time is what makes it so easy for the virus to propagate as those who are infected remain asymptomatic for a period while spreading the virus to other hosts.
In other words, once again, we have underestimated the SARS-CoV-2 virus's ability to adapt and survive, which signals that this will be a long, drawn-out battle.