Dr. Gregory Poland, editor of the medical journal Vaccine, told a MarketWatch webinar this week that he believes that COVID jabs will be around for more than 100 years. “So let me make a prediction, which will be hard for any of you to hold me to because we will all be dead by then, but your great-great-great-grandchildren will still be getting immunized against coronavirus,” Poland said. As many critics have pointed out, vaccinations in the middle of a pandemic with “leaky” vaccines (which do not kill the infection as such), will supply evolutionary pressure for viral mutation, so the prediction is likely to be self-confirming.
“While many Americans are beginning to look towards a life after Covid, and some experts are making optimistic predictions about the future of the pandemic, the entire scientific community is not in agreement.
Dr Gregory Poland, epidemiologist for the Mayo Clinic and is editor-in-chief of the scientific journals 'Vaccine' and one of the nation's top experts on vaccination and immunology, said this week that the virus could be affecting humans for the next century.
In a conversation with MarketWatch on Tuesday he gave a grave prediction that counters what some worldwide global health experts are saying.
Due to the rapid transmission of the Omicron Covid variant combined with its more mild nature, experts are hopeful that it be the strain that transitions the virus from a pandemic to an endemic, meaning the pattern of the virus is stable and predictable. Poland does not share the same optimistic point of view.
'We are not yet at any stage where we could predict endemicity. We're not going to eradicate it,' Poland said.
He noted that the virus has shown the ability to infect animals, meaning it can potentially circulate indefinitely as it transmits across species and continues to mutate.
Poland believes the virus will circulate for so long that people will still be receiving Covid shots for generations down the line.
'So let me make a prediction, which will be hard for any of you to hold me to because we will all be dead by then, but your great-great-great-grandchildren will still be getting immunized against coronavirus,'
'How can I even say such a thing? If you got your flu vaccine this fall you were immunized against a strain of influenza that showed up in 1918 and caused a pandemic.'
This is not the first grim prediction Poland has made, and he has been correct before.”