It was this time five years ago we were all beginning to get acquainted with a new term: COVID-19. By mid-January 2020, infections had been reported in multiple countries. And then in March, the World Health Organization declared a COVID-19 pandemic, and the world shut down. You know how the rest went, but where are we now? Dave Wessner is a professor of biology and public health at Davidson College. His reflection on the pandemic five years later was recently published in Forbes, and he joins me now.
Marshall Terry: It doesn’t feel like we’re still in a pandemic. Are we?
Dave Wessner: That's a good question. It's really an issue of semantics. The WHO has not officially ended the pandemic. In, I believe, May of 2023 they said it was no longer a public health emergency of international concern. And shortly thereafter, the U.S. announced also that it was not a public health emergency. So they're clearly indicating we're not in the emergency phase of the event. But according to the WHO, they haven't officially taken away the pandemic label to it.
Terry: COVID is still around. How has the virus changed in the past five years?
Wessner: Yeah, COVID is still around, and COVID is not going away. It's going to be here. It's now part of the respiratory virus landscape along with influenza, RSV and other viruses. It's changed over time. I think we all are aware of the different variants that we've heard about. The virus has mutated. That's not unusual. That's what viruses do.
We're all familiar with the influenza story. A new vaccine comes out every year that's tweaked a little bit to better match the strain of influenza that's common during that year. That's what we're seeing with COVID. It's changing over time. So, when you heard about the Delta variant or the omicron variant that came about, those seem to be more transmissible, more easily spread from person to person. They also seem to be better able to evade our immune systems a little bit. So we'll probably still see changes like that occurring over time. We haven't seen a big jump in the evolution of the virus in quite some time now.
Terry: Do we have a better idea now just where and how the pandemic started?
Wessner: There's good evidence started in Wuhan, China. The WHO first became aware of pneumonia of unknown cause Dec. 31, 2019. There's a lot of good evidence that it originated at a live animal market in Wuhan.
The one thing about the virus that I think led to its explosiveness, it did have this high rate of transmission. It did seem to be very easily transmitted from person to person. Another thing that researchers realized after a while was that there were a lot of asymptomatic cases as well — so people who were infected and probably could transmit the virus to other people, but weren't showing obvious signs or symptoms of the disease.
It seemed like COVID-19 exploded all over the place all at once. I think that level of asymptomatic infection and spread from asymptomatic people probably led to that apparent explosion that quickly.
Terry: The COVID vaccines were developed remarkably fast. The program was even called Operation Warp Speed. But you highlighted in your piece the role that decades of basic research played in leading up to that. We were kind of already on the 90-yard line in some ways, right? Tell me why you emphasized investments in big science.
Wessner: Well, I think that's that basic research. And I, sort of, for myself, define basic research as research that's done to explore a scientifically interesting question, but not necessarily research that's done with an explicit biomedical or technological breakthrough in mind.
But I think people in general maybe are not aware of how much basic research is ongoing. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, other organizations like that, fund a lot of research that may not have an explicit biomedical or technological breakthrough in mind.
And again, the vaccines, they were developed incredibly quickly, but they weren't developed from a blank slate. There had been 30 or 40 years of research that led up to that event. Researchers, for a number of years, were looking at how can we make RNA molecules in laboratory? How can we get those RNA molecules into cells? How can we modify those RNA molecules to make them more stable or more productive once they get inside cells? So that research was done — and yet the researchers from Pfizer and Moderna, you're right, they basically crossed the goal line when the COVID-19 pandemic began. But they crossed the goal line that quickly because there was a whole history of basic research that was done before them.
Terry: So five years on, are we better prepared to confront whatever the next pandemic will bring? I'm thinking, as we have this conversation right now, some are worried about bird flu, for instance. I mean, what are the lessons from COVID?
Wessner: Right. Yeah, I think that's a really good question — and it's hard to give a really good answer. I think avian flu is something that we need to be aware of, we need to be watching. One of the things I think we learned from COVID-19 is that a robust surveillance system is really necessary. I think we need to have researchers from the World Health Organization, the CDC, other governmental/non-governmental organizations surveilling the landscape — not just here in the United States, but throughout the world, too — looking for the potential emergence of new pathogens.
With avian flu, I think we need to monitor those cases that we see periodically. We need to monitor the progression of avian flu in cattle herds, and we need to be able to have an infrastructure in place to act relatively quickly if it appears that there is a major outbreak that's developing.
