3 At the present time the public health of our country has been seriously threatened after our country suffered cosmically foudroyant throe of the SARS, faced spreading of birds-flu virus.
These minority groups have a much greater likelihood of getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 and developing the disease COVID-19 because of the nature of the jobs that many of them have as essential workers in society.
It's important to keep in mind that vaccines such as the ones developed by Moderna and Pfizer remain extremely effective against severe disease caused by SARS-CoV-2— variants and all.
It's a live attenuated vaccine, and we're engineering it to express SARS-CoV-2 antigens, which should trigger the production of protective antibodies by the immune system.
Thanks to an efficient bureaucracy in a single small territory, world-class universal health care and the well-learned lesson of SARS, an epidemic of a related virus in 2003, Singapore acted early.
If the vaccination effort is more piecemeal-as it is in the U.S. now with the plodding rollout-there may be more opportunities for SARS-CoV-2 to develop mutations that make it resistant to the vaccines.
Hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola are extremely fatal — they kill up to 90 percent of people infected — while SARS, a coronavirus, has a lower mortality rate but spreads incredibly rapidly.
The new bivalent booster protects you against both the original SARS-CoV-2 strain and Omicron's BA. 4 and BA. 5 subvariants, and it's likely to provide some protection against the newer variants too.
This adds to worries that animals could serve as a reservoir for the virus - in fact, many white-tailed deer in the U.S. have already been found to have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
I mean, that's not feasible, but the speed with which good therapeutics and vaccines will be developed for SARS-CoV-2 to prevent COVID-19 is going to be spectacular.