Superiorly Broad Natural Immunity to Covid Infection Can Potentially Provide Longer Lasting Protection against Immune Evasion by Emerging Variants from Alpha to Omicron and Possibly Beyond to Omega

Abstract

COVID has become one of the deadliest obligate intracellular pathogens in over 100 years. COVID pandemic’s devastation causing to date 6.05+ million global deaths from over 460 million confirmed positive infections globally in just 2 years and close to 964,000+ US deaths out of 79.5 million confirmed positive cases in the US, continues with no sign of eradication of the virus. Antigenic variation is a predominant way of microorganisms causing human diseases to evade innate and acquired immunity. A major reason for that is COVID’s ability to evade human innate and acquired immune defenses by antigenic variation and to breach the weaker immune defenses of those among us who could not mount a timely and effective immune response to sustain ferocious attack on lungs and survive with great difficulty or succumb to an inability to breathe. While it is globally observed by Physician scientists that the OMICRON variant is highly transmissible but causes only MILD symptoms, because it is present only in the upper respiratory tract. A more virulent variant having a similar ability to spread fast could be catastrophic. How can immune evasion by COVID and its emerging variants be circumvented with better vaccines and treatments? It is high time to develop second generation of vaccines with broader protection that more closely simulates natural infection and viral entry inhibitors, eg. enveloped virus neutralizing compounds (EVNCs) that have proven broad spectrum neutralization of pandemic Influenza viruses like H5N1 or SARS-CoV-1, could prove effective against emerged and rapidly emerging strains of COVID like Omicron. A lab. Report a year after prior severe COVID infections but without any vaccine or booster dose clearly suggests that natural immunity acquired during infection is long lasting and should be meaningfully recognized by CDC and other agencies as, at least equivalent by immunization with vaccines against the emerging variants mutating periodically due to genetic variation and viral evasion.