Dr Farrar believes that the world is woefully unprepared for a possible next wave of infections
The world is not out of the woods yet when it comes to moving past the Covid pandemic, according to the World Health Organization’s chief scientist. GREAT!
Renowned British scientist Dr Jeremy Farrar, who has been criticized sharply for his efforts to downplay the Covid lab escape theory and his gloomy warnings early in the pandemic, said there is a ‘small possibility that we could go back in a bad direction’ if the virus enjoys another major set of mutations.
He said it was concerning the world still had not developed a vaccine that prevents infections or truly robust antiviral therapies that offer broad protection against multiple strains.
Dr Farrar couched his grim warning with the caveats that, at this point most if not all people have developed some measure of immunity from the virus through recovery from natural infection, vaccination, or both.
Vaccines, while not stellar at preventing transmission and infection from Covid, are highly effective at preventing the worst possible outcomes including hospitalization and deaths
Dr Farrar said: ‘The most likely scenario is the one that the world is sort of now in: that with a combination of vaccination and natural immunity from infection, new variants are to a large degree constrained. My concern has always been that there are other scenarios.
‘There is a small possibility that we could go back in a bad direction and I think it’s really important that the scientific community and public health community don’t ignore that small percentage chance, because it would be unthinkable in 2026, 2027, 2028 for us to go back to March 2020. I think that is unlikely, but we should be prepared.’
The Covid vaccines most commonly administered in the US were developed and approved by federal regulators at lightning speed.
Virologists delivered shots that were highly effective at preventing severe illness leading to hospitalization and/or death in a matter of about nine months, a process that typically takes up to a decade.
Estimates suggest the vaccines prevented more than 18 million additional hospitalizations and more than 3 million additional deaths due to Covid, but the vaccines were far less effective at preventing infection in the first place.
Globally, the vaccines are believed to have spared a staggering 20 million lives, according to a 2022 study published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The first iterations of the Covid vaccines, tailored to fight the original or ‘wild type’ strain were somewhat good at preventing transmission, but as the virus has mutated into new, unique, and more transmissible variants, the shots lost some of their efficacy, something that became abundantly clear when the delta variant threw the US into a tailspin.
The Covid vaccines, delivered to the public at breakneck speed, are believed to have prevented more than 19.8 million deaths worldwide
Dr Farrar said: ‘We are not where we need to be. We don’t have transmission-blocking vaccines. Frankly, we don’t have good enough therapies yet. We don’t have enough antiviral drugs, not just for COVID, but more broadly than that.’
The next public health crisis may not be a result of another Covid variant such as XBB.1.5, an omicron variant spinoff that the WHO dubbed the most transmissible one yet.
There are plenty of other circulating pathogens that merit surveillance, Dr Farrar has said, including H5N1, otherwise known as avian influenza.
The avian flu has rampaged across bird and mammal species and, while bird flu virus don’t typically infect humans, it’s not unheard of. It has been circulating in the UK since 2021 and appears only a handful of mutations shy of becoming able to more readily infect people.
Dr Farrar told the Guardian in February that while the human-to-human spread of H5N1 to epidemic or even worse pandemic levels is highly unlikely, allowing the virus to continue to mutate and spread among animals only strengthens the pathogen.
He said: ‘If we allow an avian virus to which none of us has got any immunity to continue to circulate in birds and then increasingly, whether it’s minks or seals, come across into the mammalian sector and therefore start to adapt, there’s a risk there.’
Dr Farrar’s position as chief scientist at the WHO is relatively new. He is only the second person to be designated chief scientist after Dr Soumya Swaminathan, an Indian pediatrician, was appointed to the new post in March 2019.
He has held a long career as a clinician scientist and headed up Europe’s biggest medical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, for a decade.
A high-profile expert who was also a prominent member of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), which advises the UK government on science and technical matters, Dr Farrar was the recipient of widespread sniping after it was revealed that he had a hand in tamping down arguments that the coronavirus leeched from a Wuhan, China lab.
A tranche of internal emails among Dr Farrar, Dr Anthony Fauci, and former National Institutes of Health head Dr Francis Collins revealed that Farrar made direct edits to a scientific paper written in February 2020 specifically to squash the theory that Covid may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Dr Farrar pushed through a crucial change that poured even more doubt over the theory: requesting that the word ‘unlikely’ to be swapped with ‘improbable’ in a statement talking about the lab leak.
This made the final sentence read: ‘It is improbable that SARS CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus.’
The emails, made public by Republican members of the US Congress, prompted calls from members of the scientific community to revoke his appointment in December, which saw him take the job in February.
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