How is humanity preparing for future pandemics?
It has been a year of quarantining, government shutdowns, mask mandates, seeing friends and family through a screen, and having to search for simple items such as toilet paper! Would you want to go through that again? I didn’t think so. Twenty-three out of the twenty-four people I interviewed said they didn’t. So now the real question is, “will there be another pandemic?”
My grandfather, Dr. Charles Strom, is a geneticist who is creating saliva antibody tests for COVID-19. He is a Yale Undergrad and got his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago medical school. He did his residency at the University of San Diego and currently lives in San Clemente, California.
In our interview, he said we will have another pandemic in the future because “the world is getting smaller. People are traveling much more frequently. These sorts of infections will no longer be able to be contained regionally. Nature is infinitely creative, and it is quite clear that this was just the second in the line of infectious respiratory agents that are going to plague the world.”
He went on to say, “The virus that causes COVID-19 is the second Coronavirus that emerged from Asia. The first Coronavirus, commonly known as SARS, was fortunately contained very early. Unfortunately, SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, was more contagious and spread throughout the world.”
Humanity needs ways to prevent these viruses from spreading and stop them in their tracks. Nobody wants a future where humans cannot stop viruses.
Firstly, what technologies do we already have to prevent this future from becoming a reality? The COVID-19 pandemic fast-tracked many medical studies and technologies that could help us achieve this. Dr. Strom explained because of COVID-19, “RNA vaccine research was accelerated because emergency use authorization was granted.” “We now know that RNA vaccines are safe and effective. It is very easy to make an RNA vaccine. Once you’ve identified the infectious agent, you can quickly determine the RNA sequence and the proteins that enable it to be infectious. We will be able to make a vaccine much more rapidly than we were able to do for COVID-19, even though the one year is still spectacularly fast. In the future, it may be two or three months for any new viral agents.” A working vaccine in three months is great, but vaccines help us gain immunity to a virus after it has spread. We need ways to stop viruses before they start.
There are a few steps we need to take to stop a future pandemic before it goes worldwide. Dr. Strom explained to me, “the best way to prevent pandemics is early definition, diagnosis, and containment.” We need to closely monitor the movement and spread of diseases to stop them from infecting people. The first step in this process is to narrow down what types of viruses are the most dangerous. Bloomberg News states that scientists think a future pandemic would stem from one of these three viral families: filoviruses, flaviviruses, and paramyxoviruses. We would have to investigate those types of viruses the most to make sure viruses that could possibly turn into pandemics are kept in check. A great way to track the spread of a pandemic is testing. Dr. Strom says, “the COVID-19 epidemic boosted research on using polymerase chain reaction. It is an old technology, but the ability to automate this, to put it into an automated platform so that a single laboratory can do tens of thousands of tests a day is new, and that’s a huge technological advance.”
Genetic sequencing works hand in hand with testing. Dr. Strom explains that we need “cheap DNA sequencing, because one of the things that you need to do when tracking epidemics is to look at where the virus originated, and this can be done by sequencing the entire virus, looking for variants, and pinpointing where a particular strain has arisen from.” In summary, it gives us the ability to test different people with a disease, determine if there are multiple strains, find where a particular strain has come from, and figure out if a particular strain might become resistant to a vaccine. Genetic sequencing allowed the United Kingdom to discover the B.1.1.7 variant, which now is the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the United States.
The system for distributing tests during the beginning of the pandemic was quite frankly a hot mess. People who were told by doctors that they had symptoms of COVID-19 couldn’t get a test. This organizational disaster caused major loss of life in the United States. The beginning of the vaccine rollout was just as bad — especially down here in Florida. “When President Obama was in office, there was an entire section of the government that was dedicated to finding epidemics early and combating them. They were responsible for quelling the Ebola epidemic. Ebola never came to the United States, and it was never spread in the United States. That committee is being re-instituted under the Biden administration,” explains Dr. Strom.
I believe when preventing pandemics; humanity needs all the help it can get. Scientists need to come together and create a global effort in researching and creating medical countermeasures that give humanity a shield from pandemics in the future. Companies are already creating remarkable technologies to do this, but they aren’t sharing their research. It makes the development process so much faster when people from all over the world are helping you and are working together. DARPA and a few labs are creating a vaccine that can make humans immune to all strains of a virus using mosaic nanoparticles. This even includes the influenza virus. Dr. Strom thinks that “it is a tantalizing possibility, and we look forward to seeing it work in the future, but it certainly is not going to be in the near future. It will probably be several years before we get to that point.” “If it works, I would think that we would see it in five to 10 years.” If many more labs were working on this, the vaccine could be turned from science fiction to reality much quicker. Politics prevent certain aspects of sharing research from being possible, and certain countries can’t get along. We need to clear those hurdles as soon as possible, or we might not get the protection that we need to stop pandemics fast enough.
In conclusion, if the world does not want a repeat of 2020, humanity needs to have the ability to monitor viruses closely, make tests and vaccines for them faster, and create a world effort to invent new lines of defense against pathogens.