San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Hotez: ‘Mother Nature already told us what she’s going to do …’
After a relentless year and a half studying COVID-19, working to create a vaccine and advocating for immunizations, Dr. Peter Hotez earned a moment of celebration. Then it rained on his parade, as a stormy forecast canceled Houston's Thanksgiving Day celebration, where Hotez — dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development — was to serve as grand marshal.
With November in the books, the holidays ahead and a new variant generating coverage and anxiety, Hotez took a few minutes to discuss omicron as best he could, suggesting we'll know far more about the efficacy of our vaccines in the coming weeks.
Q: From everything I’ve read, I get the sense we’ll have a lot more information about the omicron variant a week or two from now. But what can you tell us about it so far?
A: That's right. Well, there are a few things. One, the fact that it's already all over the world is concerning a lot of people. Meaning it's already in Europe, Australia, Hong Kong, the United States and Canada. That's not too surprising, given that it was also true of the other variants. By the time you identify it, it has already popped up all over the world. When COVID-19 was identified in China, it was already in southern Europe. So that is not in itself a concern. Nor is a case in the U.S. That was predicted and is predictable.
The big issue is knowing if it's a more severe disease — which it doesn't yet appear to be — and whether it will go the way of the other variants. It's serious. But the questions we're asking are the same: What is the level of transmissibility? Is it more than delta? Will it outcompete delta like delta outcompeted alpha? Will it have the ability to escape immunity from previous infection or vaccine immunity? Right now, it's