Only a week ago, Israel, the most daring nation on the planet, declared that it has developed a magic bullet cure for Covid. Only five doses would be enough to destroy the pathogen and, that too, within days. This medicine would make vaccines redundant. Hopefully, the claim turns out to be true. Only recently, Indian nuclear scientists made an incredible claim about a drug called 2-DG, which eventually turned out to be a big hoax. This glucose lookalike stuff, known since long as a cancer therapy drug, has not been approved by a single sane international agency anywhere in the world. If it were such a magnificent cure costing a beggarly 950 rupees per dose, all ailing Indians would have walked back home by now from the Covid hospitals.
As some experts say, the 2-DG fairytale was only a planned bluff to draw public attention away from scores of messed-up acts by the Central Government that has jeopardised lives of Indians by not being serious about vaccine procurement quite in time.
There may be a fleeting chance humans could halt the spread of SARS-2 and drive it back into nature as happened with its cousin SARS-1 in 2001 across China and elsewhere. Fortunately, this time, the severely acute global pandemic forced the best brains on the job of zeroing in on fairly effective vaccines in record time. But vaccination is an expensive toll highway that few countries will be able to access in the near term.
Most countries are still far away from a vaccine. All the same, there is no cause for big worry anymore. Pandemics always end after a natural cycle is complete. Though vaccines have never played a significant role in ending them before, this time around the human species has been luckier.
Far fewer people will die from Covid-19 because of the wonderful vaccines that have worked like magic There were no flu vaccines in 1918 when the world didn’t yet know that the great influenza was caused by a virus H1N1.
In 1957, when the H2N2 pandemic swept the world, flu vaccine was mainly a tool given only to the military. In the H3N2 pandemic of 1968, the United States produced nearly 22 million doses of vaccine, but by the time it was ready the worst of the pandemic had passed, and naturally, and importance of the vaccine had diminished significantly. That ‘too-little-and-too-late’ phenomenon had played out again in 2009 when the world finally had the capacity to make millions of vaccines. But vaccines were ignored as the virus cycle was naturally over.
A descendent of the Spanish flu virus, the modern H1N1, circulates even today as does H3N2. Humans didn’t develop herd immunity to them. The known phenomenon has the pathogen disempowered naturally because so many people became protected against it as they got infected or vaccinated.
The human immune systems learned enough about the pathogens to fend off the deadliest manifestations of infection. Humans and viruses reached kind of an immunological détente. Instead of being able to cause tsunamis of the devastating illness, the viruses succeeded only in triggering small surges of milder illness as time rolled by. Thus, the pandemic flu degenerated into a seasonal flu in an endemic form. So, the current ravaging SARS-2 virus will soon join a handful of human coronaviruses that cause colds, mainly in the winter, when conditions favour their transmission. The fear will have gone by then. Deadly flu viruses last between two and three years before degenerating to ordinary, impotent viruses.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organisation’s leading coronavirus expert, believes that the faster the affected countries come on guard religiously, the earlier will be the conclusive defeat of the virus.
India got affected horrifically only because the present-day unruly youths and headless politicians defied all safety norms and spread the Covid virus without knowing they were causing havoc to all other citizens. The same thing happened even in America and Europe. People disbelieved that a seemingly ordinary flu virus could be so deadly. The first-wave measures in India were fantastic. The whole country obeyed rules and the virus lost the power of attack within less than ten months.
But Indians did not care a damn about how the UK Government and the US authorities partly foresaw a deadlier second wave would be coming to impose failsafe protective behaviour. Indians, including top members of the executive, wrote off corona and flung all doors open to let mindless people mingle everywhere. The devastating consequences are being experienced even at this moment, and helplessly so.
Top medical experts have made it amply clear that the people will have to keep guard until the second year of initial attack had occurred. So by logic, until the end of 2022 spring, everyone around all locations has to keep using masks, maintaining social distance by avoiding crowded places and ensuring hand hygiene without once flouting on any single front. Vaccines have been a timely Godsend. As necessity has invariably been the mother of invention, the mankind today has organised the best possible protection. Indians are fortunate because it is the biggest vaccine producer in the world.
Lastly, there is big talk of the ECMO machine as if it’s the magic bullet to cure anyone suffering from nearly-irreversible lungs infection. Although it is so reassuring to see country folks coming forward to support helpless patients with money in what’s called crowd funding, it would be wise to know that the machine is not a treatment at all. It only temporarily oxygenates blood outside the body in a highly invasive manner. The lungs, muscles and tissues keep live by getting oxygen. May God bring back home all patients on the machine hale and happy! Technicians to run the machines have a more important role than doctors in keeping the patients live. So, per every machine, at least three sets of technicians have to be kept ready as they have their emergencies too.
Lastly again, unless the infection comes below five per cent on any physical location, there should not begin any un-lockdown initiative at all. Even if some minor relaxation is to be granted only to restore livelihood, Covid-appropriate behaviour has to be strictly adhered to.
This can be achieved only by imposing hefty financial penalty. No extent of physical punishment would reform people with congenital disobedience traits. India is great in ancient history books. By and large, the people of India today are very difficult to tame.