Why We Misjudge the Risks of New COVID Strains

Health authorities, various experts, and the media have put the spotlight on concerns over vaccine effectiveness and claimed the strains are likely not going to escape the vaccine. They thus assert there’s no need to ring the alarm.^{4, 5, 6, 7}

For instance, Adm. Brett Giroir, the former White House coronavirus testing czar, gave an interview on December 27 to Fox News Sunday, where he said “It is not any more serious than the normal strains of COVID… we have no evidence to suggest, nor do we believe that the vaccine would not be effective.”⁸

Yet this proclamation may have come too soon: new research is showing that existing vaccines do indeed appear to be less effective against certain variants of the coronavirus.⁹ However, because scientists may quickly update the mRNA-based vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech to make them fully effective against these new COVID variants, most experts are confident that we will still be able to contain new variants.¹⁰ If the U.S. does indeed achieve herd immunity through mass vaccination by the end of 2021, these new strains may not make much of a difference.¹¹

But there’s another element of these brand-new strains that should make you much more ready to update your risk assessment and change your plans: they’re a lot more infectious. However, the possible impact of their infectiousness has not received nearly enough attention. Such complacency is reminiscent of our “sleepwalking” response to the virus’s emergence last year, in spite of direct advance warning from myself and other experts in behavioral science and risk management.^{12, 13, 14} That’s why so many in the U.S. and elsewhere have not succeeded in the effort to plan and adapt successfully to this situation.¹⁵ Our brains don’t deal well with such threats, making it much more difficult to respond to slow-moving and high-impact train wrecks such as the pandemic itself, or to a much more infectious variant.