The next coronavirus variant might be just around the corner, especially if the American population doesn’t get vaccinated against COVID-19, a former Trump administration official said.
Adm. Brett Giroir, the former coronavirus testing czar under former President Donald Trump, told CNN this week that variants are lingering out there.
- “The next variant is just around the corner, if we do not all get vaccinated,” he said.
- “I just beg the American people to understand that to defeat this virus, we have to get everybody’s level of immunity up, and that’s just the way it is,” he said.
Right now, 165.3 million people are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, which is 49.8% of the entire U.S. population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Close to 58% of the American population has received one dose of the vaccine so far.
New COVID-19 variants could come soon
Multiple experts told Newsweek that the delta variant is only the beginning when it comes to coronavirus variants spreading rapidly in an unvaccinated population. The health experts said there will likely be a more transmissible variant out there soon, and it’s possible a “doomsday” variant could come next, as I explained for the Deseret News.
In a similar way, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House medical adviser on the coronavirus, said a COVID-19 variant worse than delta might hit the world soon if not enough people get vaccinated, per the news site McClatchy.
Epsilon, lambda variant may be dangerous variants
Two coronavirus variants have made headlines in recent days because they evade the COVID-19 vaccines.
- The lambda variant, for example, can spread fast and potentially evade vaccines, according to a new study, which not been peer-reviewed,
- The epsilon variant — also said to be highly transmissible — has some mutations that “give this coronavirus variant of concern a means to totally evade specific monoclonal antibodies used in clinics and reduces the effectiveness of antibodies from the plasma of vaccinated people,” according to the University of Washington study, which was published in the latest edition of Science.