【英文】国际政治研究所报告：2022年的世界-回到未来（81页）

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.