From The Saturday Paper, 4 September 2023:
On May 5 this year, World Health Organization director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the pandemic emergency downgraded from an acute global disaster into a more chronic, long-term affliction. Covid-19 became another in the long line of deadly pathogens that have seared their way into history, then faded into the background thrum of human disease.
Except SARS-CoV-2 isn’t just the common cold or another influenza. It is a fiendishly slippery virus that still astounds experts with its ability to morph its genetic code time and time again to get around increasingly widespread and strong human immunity, derived both from vaccines and infection.
“We knew early on this was going to be very significant,” says Associate Professor Paul Griffin, of Mater Health Services and the University of Queensland Medical School in Brisbane, “but I don’t think anyone really predicted the magnitude or the duration of this event.”
Covid vaccines, the first of which was approved in Australia in January 2021, sparked hope when they arrived. Yet while the vaccines marked a turning point, they have not delivered the decisive blow to banish SARS-CoV-2 to medical history. After years of vaccination messaging from federal and state governments, things have gone strangely quiet, leaving everyone from experts to the general public wondering what to do. Read more (paywall).
Bianca Nogrady 