Like other coronaviruses, SARS CoV-2 evolves and threatens to become endemic. Even the “common cold” is debilitating at times but - at least pre-masking - most of us had learned to live with it.
Renowned virologist Dr. William Hazeltine in his book “Variants! The Shape-Shifting Challenge of COVID-19” teaches that obstacles to freeing ourselves of Covid begin with the virus itself. The more opportunity it has to mutate, the wilier it can become. He published this at the beginning of this year before the Delta variant proved the veracity of that prognostication.
Although the “living e-book” concept doesn't quite work in paperback form, it is important reading. And unless you are a virologist or immunologist you too may struggle with terms like “
deletion” - but skip past what you do not understand. Hazeltine has a prestigious background as a professor at Harvard and in AIDS research, and knows whereof he speaks. In the back he includes several articles he wrote for Scientific American and Forbes - such as “Why We Can’t Rely on Natural Immunity To Protect Us From
Covid-19” (Forbes, Sept. 18, 2020) - that allow the layperson to digest his message in bite-sized chunks. From that article, he writes:
“Reinfection is something of a signature move for the coronavirus family, and documentation of this ability dates as far back as the late 1970s and 1980s. If SARS-CoV-2 is both more lethal and more transmissable than its seasonal cold-causing cousins, it would be naive to assume that it wouldn’t be more adept at weaponizing its oldest and dirtiest trick, too. A six-year study of the human coronavirus NL63 (HCoV-NL63), published in 2018, found that people who had contracted the virus in households and hospitals across coastal Kenya were sometimes infected not just once, or twice but three times.”
Frighteningly, Hazeltime states that the authors of the Kenya study speculate that “antibodies may have potentiated infection, rather than preventing it ...”
Although the author wrote prior to Delta and other variants, his missive is a critical part of the canon on Covid literature.
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Buy the book,
by Access Health Press,
here.
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