Dear @ASlavitt and @JeremyFarrar , great episode of In the Bubble broadcast today! Two of the sharpest, kindest, universal and most strategically and practically thinking minds of the global fight against this horrid pandemic inform us… podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/in-…
…matter of factly that our world still does NOT have, >18+ months into this global catastrophe, a coordinated global plan to fight ourselves out of this deadly ordeal. Worse, we may well be squandering our best chance right now by selfishly not focusing on vaccinating the world.
But, no matter, you simply propose to write one together, presumably also with @DrTedros and his team @WHO, and shove asap it under the noses of our so self-centred & shortsighted national politicians who are part of G20 and G7.
Yes, let’s do it! Yes, of course we can!! However, allow me to question just one element of your emerging plan. Why set March 2022 as the deadline to get the vast majority of the world vaccinated? Why 270 days?? Surely that number can concord with only one other number…
…, the chance we think we have to see an extra highly transmissible AND immune response/vaccine evading-variant COV19 emerging. That chance can be relatively precisely estimated today already: freq. of app. of more transmissible variant X freq. of app. of more successful immune
evading variant x chance they may find themselves in same individual and recombine or mutate anew to position both advantageous traits in same mutant into a hyper virulent variant strain x current estimate of number of viral replic. events+ recomb. cycles globally per unit time.
As I am sure you both realise that number is actually a moving target: ie as the viruses keep spreading further and their copy numbers continue to increase, our time to win keeps getting (exponentionally) shorter. All this to say that in this race, we don’t just need your vital..
militarily precise plan to deliver vaccines to fully vaccinate at least 70% of the world’s population by March 2022. Me thinks we need also a global (if virtual) center to watch across the world if the statistically predictable emergence of a hyper virulent variant occurs at…
by chance at the beginning, middle or end of its ca normally distributed bell curve. Basically we should pool all the sequence data generated globally in real time & compare that data in real time with the rise/severity of cases locally & how they respond to each vaccine.
If that much worse variant emerges, we need to know asap, not three months down the line, so we still have a real chance to contain it and/or improve our vaccines before we face a very much worse pandemic. @JeremyFarrar noted how much scientists had contributed already…
to containing this pandemic, but imagine how much more our globally leading epidemiologists, virologists, immunologists and ID medics could do if they were given the computer storage, analysis & communication power they need to fight this all together with you in real time.
It would be another global first in this pandemic and I think it would prove so crucial to winning this war that it would then stay as the first truly global pandemic surveillance system, probably next used in containing the rising antibacterial resistance pandemic.
Ok, it’s way past my bed time over here but I would just like to bring in one additional protagonist it on this conversation: @BillGates. Indeed, who better than him will immediately see the power that a computerised, multidisciplinary global surveillance HQ could bring?
One that might even advise governments of a single, indisputable and therefore inescapable voice? @BillGates, you superbly paid the US contribution to the @WHO when ‘the twice impeached former guy’ shamed us. Could you now consider funding something such as I describe?
Last thing @JeremyFarrar , I think we need to really examine and openly discuss why we still have no good antiviral against Cov19 when we all know that antivirals would be our last line of defence if, actually when the variants evade vaccine mediated protection.
Fixing that problem at our time of greatest need, just like @Pfzier @BioNTech_Group and @moderna_tx did for vaccine production (just you watch what is about to happen to fou vaccines, yippee!) could bring about an equivalent industrial revolution for antibiotics R&D too.
So please Jeremy, bring the remaining antimicrobial industrialists together with the very best scientists in this area and let us really focus on how to crack this problem too, NOW. The solutions exist & they are not even that expensive, what has been lacking so far is…
…of course, “just” sharp, kind, generous, altruistic, global, strategic and utterly practical thinking by those of us with the foresight, knowledge, skills and means to fix this.
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