Experts say they are no longer hopeful vaccines will stop the virus in its tracks, now that it's clear vaccinated people can develop mild disease and transmit illness to others.
In the early days of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, scientists were hopeful it might herald the long-awaited turning point of the pandemic, not only bringing the threat of severe disease, hospitalization and death to an end, but also completely halting the spread of the disease.
Experts say current vaccines are still doing their most important job - dramatically reducing people's risk of severe illness and death. But they are no longer hopeful vaccines will stop the virus in its tracks, now that it's clear vaccinated people can develop mild disease and transmit illness to others.
"Variant evolution and even subvariant evolution within omicron have shown that accumulation of mutations result in limited cross-protection when it comes to infection risk," said John Brownstein, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor."The main question continues to be does infection matter in a world where serious outcomes are averted.
A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine also found that as the virus continues to evolve, each new omicron subvariant is increasingly likely to lead to reinfection or breakthrough infection. Amid concerns of a renewed COVID-19 resurgence, federal officials are now in the process of deciding what type of vaccines should be made available in the fall, in order to better address variants that are increasingly getting better at eluding the immune response triggered by the vaccines.
Although scientists say they are not giving up on finding a vaccine that can prevent all infections, they creating such a vaccine is more difficult - a feat that very few other vaccines have accomplished.In the first months of the pandemic, reaching herd immunity was frequently discussed by public health experts as an important long-term goal in achieving national protection against COVID-19 and returning to normalcy in the face of a deadly and mysterious disease.
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