Every jab helps curb runaway threat of Covid variants, say medical experts

The Greek alphabet could soon foreshadow a catalogue of doom if the Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 keeps mutating because not enough people are being vaccinated.

Beyond that, we’ll be using names of constellations as the number of variants — and the dead — mounts. That’s according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which recently announced that names such as Orion, Gemini and Taurus will come into play if all 24 letters of the Greek alphabet are used up.

Back in June, the organisation renamed the variants after letters of the Greek alphabet to prevent the stigmatisation that was being generated with names such as “the SA variant” for what is now Beta, or “the Indian variant” for the Delta strain.

Dr Stavros Nicolaou, speaking on behalf of Business SA, which is working with the government on the mass vaccine rollout in the country, said every vaccination helped in the fight against transmission.

The Greek alphabet was something he grew up with, and now he lives in fear that we will make it all the way down to Omega — the final letter of that alphabet — before those who refuse to get the jab realise they’re creating an environment in which mutations can flourish.

“The most compelling reason to be vaccinated,” he told Business Day, “is because one of these days one of these variants is going to turn even more nasty. The closer you get to Omega, the closer you get to that scenario.”

He said “the only way to stop variants” from emerging is to “break the train of transmission and you do that by vaccinating huge swathes of the population”. He said vaccines could be pivoted as new variants emerged, but that there would always be some time that lapsed  before that happened.

“It is thus in everyone’s interests to get vaccinated when they’re eligible so that we do not get down to Omega,” he said, adding we’re already about halfway through the alphabet.

Maria van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, also warned that it’s a possibility that new variants could emerge that escape the immunity response induced by vaccines.

According to Reuters, Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, has also raised the same red flag. He said the US and the rest of the world could “be in trouble” unless more people get vaccinated as “as a large pool of unvaccinated people give the virus more opportunity to spread and mutate into new variants”.

Reuters also reports that “proponents of greater international distribution of vaccine doses by rich countries say the same thing could happen as variants emerge unchecked among the populations of poor nations where very few people have been inoculated”.

That is not to say the virus does not spread at all among the vaccinated, but opportunities for mutation are exponentially stymied. According to recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), when the unvaccinated get breakthrough infections, with the Delta variant in particular, they “carry viral loads similar to those of people who aren’t vaccinated”, but “breakthrough infections remain uncommon” and the vast majority of new infections “are among unvaccinated people”.

There are now 11 named variants, but the focus has remained strongly on the four “variants of concern”, Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta.

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