2022 was a monumental year in which there was a major war in Europe and the denial of reproductive rights in the United States.
But this was also the year that the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases legislated sweeping climate-change laws. In the U.S., a right-wing wave was prevented in the midterms. Brazil voted out a science-denying bully, slowing the wholesale destruction of the Amazon rainforest. And speaking of the war in Europe, Ukraine showed that it could successfully withstand an aggressor.
Lab fusion harnessing the power of stars became a reality (though the process to actual utilization will likely still take decades).
This is huge, but I still had to make the meme. Because the Sun is the ultimate fusion reactor. ;-)
And humans showed they could divert an asteroid a few months after Don’t Look Up released on Netflix.
But the biggest story in science is still COVID-19.
If 2020 was the year that the entire world was rudely awakened and scientists and policymakers rushed to limit spread, then 2021 was the year that deadly strains like Delta and Omicron spread rapidly among populations. Just as vaccines were demonstrated to be effective against the ancestral strain, we faced the problem of how to get these vaccines made in sufficient doses and how to get them into arms. With waning effectiveness against the newer variants, scientists immediately rushed to devise modified boosters.
Most of the world reached a state of détente in 2022. There were adequate boosters available in many countries but fewer willing takers. Masking in crowded settings fell out of favor too.
The epicenter of the pandemic is China again. The country had been lauded for effective measures in keeping infections low in the first two years of the pandemic, but continued lockdown measures at the earliest signs of infections well into the third year. China has loosened all restrictions now and as a result hundreds of millions of people risk infection.
Nature has a news-story about a medrXiv preprint with the following prediction— in China, the current COVID wave could kill up to one million people. The unknown is, of course, how effective the Chinese vaccines turn out to be. It is widely held among scientists that the vaccines available in China are less effective than the mRNA vaccines administered elsewhere.
A study by the World Health Organization published in Nature in mid-December estimates excess deaths of nearly 15 million attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 around the world. For comparison, the number of reported deaths was 5.4 million in the first two years of the pandemic.
In other words, for every person reported to have died of COVID-19 in these two years, there may be two more that died from it without the diagnosis.
But death toll is only one metric. Many of those who survived COVID-19 suffered from a host of post-infection maladies ranging from mild to disabling collectively called “Long COVID”. In the United States, there may be 20 million long COVID sufferers. While global estimates vary, around one in five of those who were infected by the virus reported that they were not back to pre-infection health two months later.
And if 2020 and 2021 were the years when lockdowns and measures prevented infections in much of the world, with the spread of the more infectious Omicron and subvariants in 2022, this became the year that much of the world got infected. Often multiple times.
Where does that leave us now? There is currently a rise in respiratory infections in the northern hemisphere. In the United States, this “tripledemic” (named because of the contribution of influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus, alongside COVID-19) is a reminder of the reality of living with multiple infectious diseases in winter.
There is also concern about a new XBB 1.5 variant that is rapidly spreading. A paper published in Cell a few days ago, noted that protection by vaccines (including even the superior bivalent ones in use in the US) was markedly reduced to newer Omicron subvariants.
However, this is to be expected as the next stage of the pandemic, and for those who have been vaccinated with boosters and/or have natural immunity from Omicron infections and have no comorbidities, there is no cause for undue alarm, as long as normal precautions are exercised.
Speaking of precautions, I see very few people masking in crowded locations, hinting at the difficulty of effectively communicating information on risk. I’ve been masking on metro trains and in crowded stores since 2020, though I don’t mask outside, in restaurants, or at work.
But on the positive side, I think more people would be willing to start masking up again if cases rose further- something that would’ve been unheard of before the pandemic.
There are signs that the scientific lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic are helping in treating other diseases.
In March 2020, I had remarked on the remarkable pace by which genomes were being sequenced and vaccines (particularly those using the RNA platform) were being developed. Vaccines were being administered by the end of the year.
A news article in Nature reports that genomic sequencing technologies and expertise developed during the pandemic is being used to track other infectious diseases such as Ebola and dengue in parts of Africa and Asia.
But perhaps the greatest scientific lesson has been in the shift of mRNA vaccines from promising candidates to proven technologies.
A few weeks ago, an mRNA vaccine showed impressive results in a skin cancer study. In a phase-2 clinical trial, Moderna reported that an mRNA cancer vaccine reduced the recurrence of a type of cancer in a small number of patients by 44% when combined with an approved immunotherapy drug. The study which has not been peer-reviewed yet, is being hailed as a “penicillin moment” for personalized treatments for cancer.
The ability to rapidly design and specifically tailor mRNA vaccines was proven in real-time during the pandemic. The same technologies are being used now to design vaccines and therapeutics for influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, HIV, and malaria among other infectious diseases.
That’s it from me. I thought about covering some of the other stories I’ve written about this year, but they’re all written up and linked on my newsletter. ;-)
My best wishes for 2023.
Anirban
Happy new year and best wishes!
We just got an additional booster, our fourth shot in Singapore.
Best wishes for the new year to you too! I always look forward to your newsletter!