 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are back with COVID-19 overview of what's happening in the world, how are the vaccinations moving, and what about the new variants which are now troubling the world. We have with us Dr. Satyit Rat. And he's going to take us to the difficult terrain of the vaccination and the new variants that we seem to be encountering. Satyit, we have discussed this enough number of times. But unfortunately, the situation is still similar. So coming to the new variants, do we think that now the spurts that we are seeing in different countries, and we seem to be seeing it in Europe, we are seeing it in Brazil, we are seeing it also in the United States, seem to indicate the new variants are slowly emerging as the major reason for the spurts? Or is it simply that epidemics move in long linear forms? So we just, you know, we see a ebb and tide, which this certainly does not correlate to such physical happenings. So let me be a little pedantic about this, or all right. Let me be a little more pedantic than usual about this. The so-called parsimonious explanation, the minimal explanation is that we are still in the midst of an emerging spreading epidemic with its own eddies and backwaters, its patterns of ebb and flow, and so on and so forth. Is that not enough to explain the current patterns of some places in India showing an increase in numbers, many other countries beginning to show some increase, some other countries that had showed an increase earlier, now showing a decrease? All of that is explicable by that minimal expectation of an emerging and spreading epidemic. However, it is correct that variants that are, at the very least, much better at spreading are certainly becoming more and more prominent. And it's quite possible that they are playing at least some role in the reemergence of higher case numbers in some places. However, I am still skeptical about whether that is likely to be a major explanation for the reemergence of numbers. So for the moment, I'm going to err on the side of skepticism. So some caution with respect to emerging numbers with new variants, but it could be largely explained by the fact there is an ebb and tide, particularly as we see in India. So it's also interesting those states which had earlier higher occurrences also seem to show higher occurrences now, which would seem to indicate that external connections, new infections could also be taking place because of that, because seem to be more highly connected to the epidemic in the rest of the world. Maybe we don't know again. One question that's still there, there seems to be different kinds of sequencing that is being done in terms of the total numbers of new sequences that is being looked at. For instance, you had commented on this earlier. The UK has been doing quite intensive sequencing of the people who they sample in terms of people who are infected. And so it also seems certain other countries are picking up on this. Now, in this, it does seem to show that it is not unexpected that obviously those which are mutating as new characteristics, so to say, are also becoming more successful. And increasingly, you can see the numbers, for instance, in UK becoming of the new variants. And also, it seems in Brazil. So some also caution on this count may not be for India, we don't know. But maybe some caution that we could see emergence of newer varieties taking place. And also, US seem to be seeing both the UK variety and the Brazilian variety both taking place over there. So this could be in the future an issue partly because we also had our vaccine vaccination takes place. UK has a lot of vaccinations. The US is showing some vaccinations not in significant numbers. So we should be also seeing some M because of the vaccines, but we also see some numbers rising. So combination of both we could think. So you've put your finger on what I would have said as a follow up to the last point, which is that one is forced to fall back on parsimonious skepticism in part because of lack of evidence. And the lack of evidence is a consequence of the lack of governments, not simply in India, but many governments across the world in not putting in place the reliable logistical capacities and resources necessary to do intensive monitoring of the epidemic. Out of half a million in excess of 5 lakh virus sample sequences available from across the world, I don't think India has even contributed 10,000. We would not really know. And exactly. What are the three variants in the country? Therefore, we have no way of knowing whether we have emergent variants or not in any reliable evidence sense. So clearly that's going to be a major issue. But two other things are at stake here with respect to the variants. One is that the norm variant so far, one is repeatedly reminded of wisdom from the mouths of babes. One is repeatedly reminded of the erstwhile US Secretary of Defense, Ronald Rumsfeld, who said, there are things we know we don't know, but there are also things we don't know we don't know and from the mouths of babes, wisdom. In that sense, what we do know is interesting enough and that is all the variants that we seem to have found so far of interest and concern are variants that spread rapidly, but not necessarily variants that escape pre-prior immunity, whether because of prior infection or because of prior vaccination. And I think that is because there is such a large number of people out there who have neither been infected nor been immunized in the prior sense that they're still available for the infection to spread. This is going to change. And as this changes, we are almost certainly going to start seeing the emergence of a new wave of variants that are going to be evading immunity, not totally, but sufficiently to keep the infection spreading and smoldering. So it will enter, perhaps, an endemic stage with vaccine versus virus, evolutionary struggle continuing, and we will need to be on guard for quite some time. So it is not that we will see the end of the epidemic in a definitive sense that it will be completely stamped out. That's not likely to happen. We are really entering a new era of endemic COVID-19. So to say, even if the vaccines are successful, because even now, as we know, 130 countries have to receive any vaccines, while with vaccine nationalism running rampant, some countries have more than what they need and more than what they can actually give to their citizens because the supply chain to reach it to the people just simply are not there. But they still would like to hold, even if it means the vaccines getting wasted because they have a shelf life of a certain amount. We're not talking about the other issues, for instance, in India itself. How much of the supply that, for instance, AstraZeneca vaccine serum institute was making is able to deliver because they had promised they're going to do 100 million per month, but they have not been able to do more than 50 million as of now. And that's not only for India, but also for other countries. So we also have problems on the supply chain variety. But I'd like to come back to some optimistic issue. Satish, we are also talking about, for the first time, that not for the first time, as we talked about earlier, but there doesn't seem to be any urgency on this of trying to make universal vaccines. Now, this has been talked about for flu vaccine earlier. Now there is a serious discussion that COVID-19, we should try and make universal vaccines and there are some efforts in that direction. Two recent papers seem to show that there is some movement on that. How do you look at putting on your, what shall I say, futuristic hat? How do you see this evolving, say, over the next three, six, eight months? Because we have seen an enormous increase in focus on vaccines that we have ever seen before. So that's to the positive for the world. So do you think there is some hope in this direction? So let's look at two separate aspects of this question you've asked Ruby. One is the scientific, which is quite remarkably interesting. And the other is the political, which is to do with what a response is likely to be looking like in the framework of capitalism. So let me start with the scientific component first. There are two ways to think about a universal antiviral vaccine. Let's keep in mind that scientists and technologists have been talking about a universal influenza vaccine for quite some years without success. Despite the fact that annually we keep making new influenza vaccines for the year. So there are two different scientific ways of thinking about these universal vaccines. One is that we are stopping the virus from infecting cells by making antibodies that prevent the virus surface from sticking to the cell surface. And because these antibodies sort of indiscriminately cover the virus surface, if the virus has enough changes that allow it to walk the little knife's edge of still binding to cells but not binding to the antibodies, then it won't be blocked, it won't be capped, and therefore it will bind. This is quite honestly a problem both for the virus and for the host, this walking the knife's edge. Have we managed to figure out a reliable set of antibodies to generate that simply will not let the virus have a knife's edge to walk? That if it changes such that it cannot bind to antibodies, then it will not bind to the cell. Can we achieve that? And structurally that has so far there's been a fair amount of understanding about this but in practical terms, I haven't seen anybody come up with a clear set of rules about how to make a vaccine that generates such a response. The second component in designing a universal vaccine is not to depend on antibodies at all, but to say we have T cells that can kill infected cells in which the virus peptides are recognized on the surface by T cells. And that's a whole different modality of approaching antiviral immunity altogether. So both of these are being attempted. The T cell dependent vaccines are an unknown in the sense that currently we have no successful vaccine that's known to depend on T cell immunity for its success. So that's one kind of unknown. So both designing a vaccine that generates complete impermeable wall antibodies regardless of virus variation or and including in that vaccine T cell targets that generate a fallback immunity, those are the ways in which universal antiviral vaccines are being attempted. This is true for influenza, it is true for COVID-19. Am I saying that this is not going to be successful? No. Am I saying that we don't know how long it'll take before this is going to be successful? Yes, I have. And that's where this brings me to the political point which is consider what the driving force of making vaccines available across the world is. It's from the for profit sector, it's a standard capitalist response and therefore companies will not invest if there isn't demand. And if the pandemic rate of spread falls below a certain point, if the force of demand falls, I'm not certain that companies are going to still keep going. So it boils down to what we have always talked about that market demand does not address public health issues. You have to address this by the larger goal that if you want human systems to work properly then you need to think outside the market, particularly when it comes to issues like public health and as we know from the Texas deep freeze that saw the grid collapse, also for reliability of the electrical grid. Certain problems are not addressed by the market unlike what people think that unfortunately whether it's electricity or whether it's the microbes, they do not obey the laws of the market. That is the problem that we have. And on that note, we are going to log off on this issue of our COVID-19 analysis. Thank you Satyith for being with us and sharing your wisdom of years on what these issues are and how we should address them. This is all the time we have a news click today. Do keep watching news click and do visit our website.