DALLAS — Although COVID-19 is presently at one of its lowest rates in the Lone Star State, one Texas-based vaccine scientist is wary of what’s to come this winter.
Dr. Peter Hotez, an inventor of a COVID vaccine technology, took to Twitter this week to talk about COVID-19 and how rates may rise again, but in a different way than before, through the holiday seasons.
Right now Texas is experiencing about six new cases per 100,000 people, according to Hotez.
Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, said his concern stems from what’s happening in Western and Central Europe.
Those trends “historically had been a pretty reliable indicator of what we might expect in the U.S. weeks later ... ,” he tweeted Sunday.
He pointed to new cases rising again in countries such as Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France.
“The difference, however, this time is that the rise does not seem to be fueled by any one variant,” he tweeted. “This wasn’t the case previously where one could pin the rise to the emergence of say alpha, delta, etc.”
What might happen is “not as cut and dry and still squishy to predict,” Hotez says, because no predominant variant has been linked to the rise of cases abroad.
He pushed for vaccinations, including COVID boosters and the flu shot, tweeting, “I was hoping that the winter of 2023 would not resemble our alpha winter 2021 or omicron BA.1 winter 2022, but I think we could face a rough COVID winter again in 2023, unless we max out our boosters.”
Hotez recently told the Houston Chronicle there’s a few reasons “we’ve been playing the long game” with COVID,” including the “rapid evolution” of variants.
“Despite what President Biden said on '60 Minutes,’ this is not over,” he said. “It’s just a new Little Shop of Horrors. And that’s going to continue.”
Although President Joe Biden said “the pandemic is over” during a September interview on "60 Minutes," his administration said last week that the COVID-19 public health emergency will likely continue through January as officials braces for a uptick in cases this winter, The Associated Press reported.
COVID-19 is the third major coronavirus epidemic or pandemic this century, he said, with SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012. Based on that, a future COVID pandemic should be expected.
“We need to do better than try to make a new vaccine each time,” he said. “The big brass ring is to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine so we don’t have to worry so much. And I think that’s feasible based on what we’re seeing so far.”
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