For those still spending sleepless nights wondering how long they have to live with COVID-19, here’s music to their ears.
According to Prof. Dame Sarah Gilbert, who created the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the coronavirus is unlikely to mutate into a deadlier variant and will eventually end up as a common cold.
She is of the view that viruses tend to become less virulent as they circulate through the population, Daily Mail reported.
“There is no reason to think we will have a more virulent version of SARS-CoV-2… there aren’t very many places for the virus to go to have something that will evade immunity but still be a really infectious virus,” Gilbert was quoted as saying.
“We already live with four different human coronaviruses that we don’t really ever think about very much and eventually SARS-CoV-2 will become one of those,” said the 59-year-old Gilbert who led the team which created the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID vaccine, which is the most commonly used jab globally.
“It’s just a question of how long it’s going to take to get there and what measures we’re going to have to take to manage it in the meantime,” she stated at a seminar of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Gilbert, who specialises in development of vaccines against emerging viruses, called for more funding to help prevent future pandemics.
“We’re still trying to raise funds to develop other vaccines that we were working on before the pandemic, against diseases that have caused outbreaks in the past and will cause outbreaks in the future. We are being financially supported for our ongoing work against COVID… but when we try to return to projects we were working on before coronavirus we’re still trying to get funding,” she remarked.
