Good virus news

An affordable vaccine developed in Houston is certainly a welcome way to start new year.

Some of us, when the clock nears midnight tonight, will count down with friends — perhaps a tradition we missed out on a year ago. Others of us will be fast asleep. Either way, we’re now mere hours away from the end of yet another long, pandemic-ridden year full of loss. Even with the arrival of lifesaving vaccines, more Americans died in 2021 due to COVID-19 than did in 2020. We’re nearing a devastating 75,000 Texan deaths due to COVID-19 since the pandemic began nearly two years ago.

What’s especially sobering is that there is no guarantee that this next year won’t be just as calamitous. The new, super-contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus could put as many as 1 million Americans a day on the sick list by the end of January, overwhelming hospitals and our already frayed health care workers, despite early data suggesting the new cases might not be quite as deadly as earlier incarnations of COVID. Already, lines for testing in Harris County and elsewhere have grown long, and experts are warning that the few therapies doctors have to treat COVID are fast becoming scarce.

Against all this, it is with a profound sense of gratitude that we note the arrival in our own city during the last week of 2021 some much-needed good news for the world.

An affordable and easy-to-produce two-dose vaccine developed over the last 20 months by Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Dr. Peter Hotez, co-directors at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, has been approved for wide-scale use in India.

The new vaccine, Corbevax, uses an old-school process that mimics the Hepatitis B vaccine. It should be much easier and cheaper for countries to re-create, manufacture and distribute. In trials, Corbevax proved a 90 percent efficacy rate against the original COVID-19 strain and about 80 percent against the delta variant. We don’t yet know of its effectiveness against omicron.

Bottazzi and Hotez said 150 million doses are ready to go, with 100 million more per month expected next year. And crucially, rather than hide the recipe, the scientists told us the blueprint for their vaccine is ready and available for other manufacturers to use.

“We want to translate our know-how and leave it for someone else,” Bottazzi told the editorial board.

The new vaccine isn’t likely to slow the immediate, omicron-fueled surge, even if it does prove effective against the now-dominant variant, not in India and certainly not in America, where the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson and Johnson vaccines have been available for several months. Vaccines’ peak effectiveness doesn’t usually begin until 10 to 14 days after injection, and the omicron surge is already upon us.

So far the hardest hit in the Houston area, as in the rest of the nation, are those who have not yet been vaccinated. That was true for all of Texas, and across each of the variants. Hotez told us that in 2021, 85 percent of people who died from the virus in Texas were unvaccinated. About half of the remaining 15 percent were partially vaccinated.

Clearly, the refusal by some Americans to get vaccinated is a major reason why this pandemic has remained such a killer.

But it’s also true that no matter how good a job we do at vaccinating ourselves, the virus will continue to spread and evolve so long as it has hosts in which to do so, anywhere in the world. As each new variant emerges, the chances that one will prove resistant to our vaccines only increases. So in that light, hundreds of millions of doses for the world’s second-most populous country — where the vaccination rate is currently only 43 percent — is good news for everyone.

“We recognize that the only way we’re going to end this pandemic is to vaccinate our way out of it – and specifically to prevent new variants of concern from arising in the southern hemisphere,” Hotez told us.

With well over 3 billion people in the world not yet vaccinated, we’ll need billions more doses to give to anyone willing to get inoculated. And until we get there, we’ll keep plowing our way through the Greek alphabet, naming new variant after new variant. It’s likely to be low-cost vaccines like Corbevax that help us most.

“This is a gift from Texas to the world,” Bottazzi said of the new vaccine.

That spirit is one that we all should embrace. The U.S. government and other developed nations must ramp up their commitment to increasing vaccine supply and distribution worldwide. The World Health Organization set a target of 40 percent vaccination rates in all countries by the end of 2021, but only five of 54 African countries will meet that goal.

Until vaccination rates in rural Texas are as high as those in its most populous cities, until African nations are as inoculated as Europe and the United States, then all of us will remain vulnerable.

So when you’re raising a glass to the New Year tonight, save a cheer for Bottazzi and Hotez’s team at Baylor College of Medicine for working to protect people they’ll never meet on the other side of the world. Their work underscores how well they’ve learned the fundamental lesson of the COVID era: Our lives, whether rich or poor or near or far, are intertwined.