Changing Shots
Over the past few years COVID has surged, died down, and surged again. Places all over the world experienced this trend, and regardless of how they’d handled it in the past, a new variant would pose a new challenge. Even a few months ago we all dealt with the infamous Delta variant, which was the cause of the Indian outbreak of COVID. Each new variant (or at least the bulk of them) were known to be more infectious and have an easy time to evade the vaccines; so, although the vaccines still have a very high efficacy rate against it, COVID is slowly overcoming its strengths. Indeed, this comes at a time when vaccination rates are still somewhat low in areas of the world. All of this combines to make herd immunity impossible, with health experts predicting that the vaccination rate needs to be at 90 percent to achieve it. With more dangerous variants likely to arrive in the coming future, lockdowns are very likely, hurting our economies even more.
Recently, the FDA announced that a new COVID-19 shot will target the omicron variant this fall. The decision to create a new COVID-19 shot was backed by an expert panel of independent vaccine experts, who voted 19 to 2 for the shot. The new shot will have vaccine makers modify the original vaccination shots to target a different variant. As of now, the panel has not decided on which Omicron sub-variants the shots will target.
What do you think about this new potential vaccine and will COVID ever end?
I am not a financial advisor and my comments should never be taken as financial advice. Investments come with risk, so always do your research and analysis beforehand.
