Breaking news about the deadly COVID-19 flashed across our news screens Thursday morning. Finally, President Joe Biden’s pandemic alert team seemed to be issuing the lifesaving medical science warning call we all urgently needed to hear and heed. Before it is too late!
Yet it whooshed across our screens so quickly and quietly that you may well have missed it. Just as its real urgency has apparently been missed or at least not made powerfully clear to you by President Biden’s top newsmakers of medical science and message politics. Which is why most of the news reporters who cover those newsmakers have just missed the biggest news of the day.
Namely: We in the USA may soon be threatened by a new COVID-19 variant that is even more dangerous and even deadlier than the now-surging delta variant. We are urgently warning about a new variant that might develop here soon that is as contagious as the current delta variant – yet is also far more resistant to our existing vaccines (which protect us against the most severe effects).
And here is part two of this warning call: There is just one main reason why a deadly new strain may develop here. It is because some 93 million people in our midst – our families, friends and neighbors – are refusing to be inoculated by the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson &Johnson vaccines while we know they can be effective against all strains in North America, including the delta variant.
Bottom Line: We can only be safe, here in the USA, if we convince vax-refusers to get vaccinated. Pronto!
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser and the face of America’s pandemic alert system, delivered that alarming news in an interview with the McClatchy. But you may well have missed it. Because Fauci didn’t deliver that warning with BREAKING NEWS urgency; he sort of eased into it. And that’s probably why the McClatchy article reporting his exclusive comments also eased into this most alarming news. (The article led with the latest numbers of the delta variant surge nationwide. It summarized Fauci’s warning in the second paragraph, but then saved Fauci’s most alarming words for the news article’s powerful kicker. And of course that probably means most of your favorite television news-readers never even saw them.)
What McClatchy reported was that Fauci warned that we are presently giving the highly contagious delta variant “ample” opportunity to morph into an even deadlier variant.
“If we don’t crush the outbreak to the point of getting the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated,” Fauci said, according to McClatchy, “then what will happen is the virus will continue to smolder through the fall into the winter, giving it ample chance to get a variant which … could … push aside delta.”
“If another one comes along that has an equally high capability of transmitting but also is much more severe, then we could really be in trouble. People who are not getting vaccinated mistakenly think it’s only about them. But it isn’t. It’s about everybody else, also.”
You may have noticed that right-wing politicians are not just having a political field day by attacking and distorting Fauci’s warnings and recommendations. They have made this patriotic, fervently apolitical medical science professional the poster-face of their panicked effort to divert responsibility for the pandemic surges that have been aided by the most stridently right-wing Republican governors who think it is good politics to oppose commonsense scientific ways of safeguarding all Americans.
So you can expect to soon hear the far right pols use their favorite media megaphones to challenge Fauci for promoting gloom-and-doom coronavirus concerns that a variant resistant to present vaccines could develop.
Small World: A new study of a COVID-19 strain known as the lambda variant, which is now menacing South America, was studied by scientists half a world away, in Tokyo – and their findings may well validate Fauci’s heightened concerns in the USA. The Japanese scientists found that the lambda variant was resistant to current vaccines — yet also highly contagious, Reuters reported Sunday.
“The Lambda variant of the coronavirus, first identified in Peru and now spreading in South America, is highly infectious and more resistant to vaccines than the original version of the virus the emerged from Wuhan, China, Japanese researchers have found,” Reuters reported. “In laboratory experiments, they found that three mutations in Lambda’s spike protein … help it resist neutralization by vaccine-induced antibodies. Two additional mutations … help make Lambda highly infectious, they found.”
So here in the USA, it is indeed possible that Fauci has sounded his warning siren just in time to save us from a preventable danger: The delta variant that is sweeping every state could morph into something much worse — a new variation that cannot be halted or even curbed by our existing lifesaving vaccines.
But we also know there is one (but only one!) way we can prevent that from happening: We can save ourselves, our loved ones, our friends and neighbors if everyone gets vaccinated – now! Before it is too late.
Readers may email Martin Schram at martin.schram@gmail.com.
