Covid Still Isn't Over

Pfizer's CEO tests positive again, plus a warning against "reinfection complacency"... and Russian bats

Since I last wrote about Covid-19 here on July 29, another 24,200 Americans have died of the virus—an average of more than 400 a day.

Thankfully, cases and deaths are both trending down.

But the pandemic isn’t over…

Case in point: Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has tested positive for the second time since my July 29 post.

Sixty-year-old Bourla is double-boosted but was too close to his prior infection to get the new booster because he was “following CDC guidelines to wait three months since (his) previous COVID case which was back in mid-August.”

It’s true that vaccines and boosters and new treatments like Paxlovid are keeping people alive and out of hospitals. And Bourla says he’s feeling fine. But his case is another example of people being treated with Paxlovid and then getting infected again.

The new Pfizer (and Moderna) boosters reached the market too late to prevent Pfizer’s CEO from getting infected twice. And they were too late to stop the summer wave of BA.4 and BA.5 infections and deaths.

Also this summer, people with disabilities and those needing home care or nursing homes were forced to watch Joe Manchin completely “nuke” all funding for home and community-based services in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Those most at risk are now left “wondering when the next opportunities will arise to change the systems that are supposed to support them but too often leave them vulnerable to harm.”

So for millions of American patients, not only is the pandemic not over but, thanks to Joe Manchin, they’ve just been hung out to dry.

A warning from Australia…

In Australia, where there were only 430,000 cases and fewer than 4,000 Covid-19 deaths in 2020 and 2021, cases have exploded in 2022 to more than 10 million and deaths have more than tripled to 14,927.

This weekend, I saw the story of leading Australian immunologist Chris Goodnow, an “extremely fit Australian scientist, who hiked, biked and surfed at Sydney’s Manly Beach” and “had been bolstered by four doses of vaccine.”

Having spent nearly four decades studying how white blood cells in the immune system protect us from infection, Goodnow felt pretty safe about removing his mask…

On May 26, he came down with a scratchy throat. Twelve days later his immune system had not cleared the virus. Then he got hit by congestive heart failure. He developed a chest cough and was breathless. His ankles swelled up.

He survived, but:

As a consequence of the infection, last July Goodnow resigned his directorship of the Immunogenomics Lab at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, “for health reasons.”

Goodnow is now warning that vaccines don’t prevent transmission and, unlike with the common cold, getting reinfected with Covid-19 can worsen a patient’s outcome.

He points with concern to a study, yet to be peer reviewed, from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, led by Ziyad Al-Aly at the Washington University School of Medicine…. The risk of cardiovascular disease, for example, increased after one infection, but doubled in people who had two infections, and tripled in those who had been infected thrice.

And Goodnow is even skeptical that variant-specific vaccines are the big answer to getting back to normal.

Given the intense level of viral evolution, vaccines find themselves in what Goodnow calls a “two steps forward three steps back dilemma.”

What can be done? For now, Goodnow is back to wearing a mask and says he is joining the growing list of experts who are “working hard to stop endless waves of reinfection.”

… And watch out for Russian bats

As Alice Park wrote in her latest article in TIME on September 22, we can’t stop worrying about Russia or bats:

Virus-hunting researchers have discovered a new coronavirus in bats that could spell trouble for the human population. The virus can infect human cells and is already able to skirt the immune protection from COVID-19 vaccines.

After talking to researcher Michael Letko, assistant professor in the Paul Allen School of Public Health at Washington State University, Park tells us the “good news”:

Letko’s studies show that, like the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, Khosta-2 does not seem to have genes that would suggest it could cause serious disease in people.

The “bad news,” according to Letko:

“SARS-CoV-2 could spill back over to animals infected with something like Khosta-2 and recombine and then infect human cells. They could be resistant to vaccine-immunity and also have some more virulent factors. What the chances of that are, who knows. But it could in theory happen during a recombination event.”

So this is maybe not a good week to watch Contagion again.

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