【英文】国际政治研究所报告：2022年的世界-回到未来（81页）

英文研究报告 2021年12月31日 06:18 管理员

Will the Omicron variant prove to be more transmissible? Maybe. Will it be capable of evading immune defenses? Maybe. Other questions are easier to answer. Will the Omicron variant be the last? Not likely. Will we be able to defend ourselves if it does evade immune defenses? Probably, yes, by creating new boosters and vaccines designed specifically to impede this variant. Will there be more variants after Omicron? Almost certainly.

The biggest threats to human health, to economic health, and to the stability of our societies in 2022 will come not from the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and the rise of new variants, in my expectation, but from the continuing problems of vaccine resistance, vaccine inequity among nations, and science denial among segments of our citizenries who get their “news” and their “research” from politically and financially driven obfuscators, on television and the web, and who confuse lies and bias with empirical reporting. Not everyone who can type a search word into Google or operate the remote of a television is an expert in molecular evolutionary virology.

We need those experts, and we need to listen to them with attention, because they can tell us - if not precisely what is coming, and when - then at least generally what is coming, sooner or later. Some people have been led toward complacency, about the COVID-19 virus, by what they take for the conventional wisdom on dangerous new viruses: that they gradually but inevitably evolve toward lesser virulence, lesser harmfulness, as they adapt to the human population.