“We Have to Get Out of This Phase”: Interview with White House Covid "Czar" Ashish Jha on the Future of the Pandemic

“We Have to Get Out of This Phase”: Ashish Jha on the Future of the Pandemic President Biden’s COVID czar talks about his public-health philosophy, his Twitter threads, his unlikely path to the White House, and where we go from here. Dhruv Khullar The New Yorker

...

What’s currently driving new variants is their ability to escape immunity. As we get more complex immunity—meaning that some people have immunity from the original vaccines, other people from newer vaccines, other people have immunity from infections with Delta and Omicron—you’re building a population immunity that gets harder and harder for the virus to break through. I do think there is a limit to how much the virus can keep evading.

There are things we can do to slow down the spread, like substantially improving indoor air quality and more widespread testing during surges. We have got to build a new generation of vaccines that block transmission, like oral or intranasal vaccines. If we get those—and I think the science is starting to come together—we can drive down transmission to the point where infection numbers are a tenth of what we have now and deaths are substantially lower, too. Then COVID really does begin to fade into the background. Is that going to be easy? Is that going to happen tomorrow? No. But I think we can get there over the next twelve or eighteen months.

...