Don't Let Boris Johnson Hide Behind The New Variant – It Was His Making
Hold up a mirror to a “strategy” based solely on vaccines and what emerges? Variants that risk undermining them.
The UK is confronted with variants that threaten the potency of vaccines and public health, but their emergence was politically-assisted.
Mutations of viruses occur randomly and are part of the natural Darwinian process of evolution. Occasionally, a series of mutations may render the behaviour of a virus more favourable for its survival. This is facilitated in an environment that allows a virus to frequently jump between hosts, and continually replicate. Policies that tolerated high circulation of the virus fostered this probability.
Political passivity enabled these mutations to occur in the UK and for more challenging variants to become dominant.
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But local challenges quickly become global challenges. “A problem anywhere, is a problem everywhere,” Professor Chris Whitty affirmed. Without a comprehensive, long-term strategy, further variants that threaten global health security are likely to arise on home soil.
Ironically, the UK committed to improving global health security through its (genuinely) “world-beating” genomics expertise for new mutations.
However, surveillance alone will not prevent the origins of future problems. High levels of replication must be thwarted and the evolutionary process slowed. This is achieved by keeping infection rates low, through a strengthened, locally-delivered test-trace-isolate-support system.
The Biden-Harris administration published their plan for responding to Covid-19 in the United States on their first full day in office, yet the UK government still do not have a strategy.
The current mitigation approach involves an unsustainable blend...
