A few weeks ago, the Washington Post announced “President Biden, doubly boosted, is in a much more favorable position to fight COVID-19 than President Donald Trump was before the rollout of vaccines.” NPR elaborated, “Even if you’re the president, it’s hard to avoid a breakthrough Covid infection.” We all know many individuals who have been vaccinated and boosted, yet still get infected. How does that happen? One reason is that original COVID-19’s SARS CoV-2 virus – to which human populations have built immunologic resistance through exposure, vaccine or both – no longer circulates. References to current illness as COVID-19 represents a category mistake (when a person talks about something as though it’s a different type of thing from the thing it is). It was still pertinent to speak of ‘COVID-19’ after the late 2020 exit of the ‘ancestral’ version, since certain SARS CoV-2 descendants, via mutation, found gaps in our immunologic defenses to become next-generation (but milder) ‘variants of concern’ (VOC). They ran sequentially through the Greek alphabet, springing up around the globe: Alpha (England), Beta (South Africa), Gamma (Brazil), and Delta (India). All of these second-wave variant-strains ultimately disappeared, superseded in the category of coronavirus infection by the significantly milder virus found circulating late 2021 in South Africa. This virus […] read more