The first reports of a new illness emerged in late 2019, but it was 5 years ago this month that the World Health Organization declared the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak a pandemic. In this issue, C&EN takes a look at how the pandemic changed science and scientists and how science will continue to work to protect us from COVID-19 and related threats in the future.
It is sobering to recall those early days of the pandemic, when news reports showed how the illness that became known as COVID-19 shut down country after country and overwhelmed hospitals. But the way researchers rushed to find solutions was also inspiring.
Much of the work that enabled such a swift response to the new coronavirus had been conducted years earlier. This work, including visualizing the virus and its components, creating a stabilized spike protein that could become a vaccine, and tailoring new antivirals, was based on efforts spurred by the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that started in 2003.
Scientific research relies on a vast global web of connections among researchers and their discoveries. Virologists and other experts described a common pattern in 2020. They’d seen money and attention rush toward the SARS virus back in 2003, when it was new. But as SARS cases waned, so did that focus. The foundational work would become important for SARS-CoV-2—it belongs to the same family of coronaviruses as the original SARS—but it took effort to revive those 15-plus-year-old programs.
According to University of Pittsburgh virologist Jeremy Kamil, COVID-19 today is dramatically less deadly thanks to vaccines and widespread infection having given most people some degree of immunity. Not because the virus has evolved to be less dangerous.
Five years on from the pandemic pronouncement, the world is moving on. But there will be another pandemic. The current bird flu outbreak could be one such candidate to become more of a problem, as the H5N1 virus moves through different animals, picking up mutations as it goes. If the right set of mutations finds the right conditions to spread, the world could rapidly find itself again scrambling to adjust. This combination of unpredictability and real-time discovery is what makes it so challenging to provide public health communication on emerging threats.
Invariably, science relies on lessons from the past and investments for the future. Even if this time we escape, if the spark fails to land on dry tinder, we won’t always be so lucky. We don’t know if the next pandemic will be caused by another coronavirus, or a strain of influenza, or some other pathogen. But the world is full of possibilities. We need to be prepared. Anti-infective programs in both the public and private sectors can turn on a dime to develop vaccines and treatments for new threats, so long as they’re well funded and sufficiently staffed. Likewise, existing technologies like messenger RNA vaccines can be rapidly retooled for emerging viruses—but they need ongoing investment or they could be condemned to linger on dusty shelves.
“The technologies are in place,” Kamil says, but it takes political will and infrastructure to realize their potential.
Do the work, save the samples, and keep networks connected. Whenever the next pandemic begins, science needs to be at the ready.
This editorial is the result of collective deliberation in C&EN. For this week’s editorial, the lead contributor is Laura Howes.
Views expressed on this page are not necessarily those of ACS.