To the Editor:
It’s been about a year since I wrote The Altamont Enterprise regarding the need for everyone to get vaccinated against COVID. Great progress has been made; still we have unnecessary mortality from the virus due to a lack of anti-COVID vaccinations on a national and global basis. The scientific data is incontrovertible that the vaccinations against COVID work for all except a minority of people who are primarily immunocompromised.

While we were busy trying to control the COVID-19 virus, it has been mutating and evolving. For example, this has resulted in a strain known as Omicron that is more contagious but typically less sickening. It can spread very quickly; human mortality has decreased but is still significant in individuals with other morbidity factors and those unusually susceptible to the strain of virus.

So far, the various approved vaccines and their boosters are largely meeting our immunological needs. However, with the millions of people who have active COVID-19 infections, there is a huge amount of virus in the world to mutate and evolve into new strains — which in turn will make it more difficult to control the virus.

Therefore, I advocate the vaccination of all the people on the globe for COVID-19 to make it less likely for new strains to appear and to allow us to continue coming up with vaccines and other methods that will control the disease in a scientific manner. Countries like the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Japan, and France should lead the way in seeing that the world is vaccinated.

They should work closely with the United Nations so that we have some overall coordination. The lives saved may be yours and your relatives; it’s time that we not only cause global problems but we work together to solve them.

It is to the advantage of the COVID virus to have longer lasting, easier transmitting infections than it is to be highly pathogenic and kill their host (people). However, it is possible that something will evolve within the virus that could make it worse for mankind, harder to control, with possible long-term effects.

If we want to interrupt this virus evolution then we need to tackle this on a global basis and it should be our highest priority for health problems on this Earth.

Dr. Ward Stone

Troy