That's another good question. I also am not a medical doctor, but I can give you my opinion based on my knowledge.
One of the things we need to ascertain and understand more clearly is whether, if you get infected with different variants...because specifically with omicron it's quite a different type of viral infection, and we don't yet know how that's going to impact the development of what we call “short-term long COVID disease” and potentially “long-term long COVID disease”. That's one aspect we have to understand.
The other thing is how vaccination mitigates the development of long COVID when you do get infected. We know that if you have been vaccinated the severity of disease is reduced when you get infected—and now more so with omicron, which tends to be a wimpier virus in terms of pathogenesis. But we still don't understand fully how that's going to impact specific cues that establish what would be cardiovascular complications, which further link to cognitive impairments and any other neurological diseases that a lot of people are suffering from.
Those studies still need to happen, but I don't think we should wait in our development of therapeutics to try to define all the characteristics. We should be embarking on therapeutic development and testing as soon as possible. Because it's a longer manifestation of disease, we need to be looking at ways to cut it off at the knees, if you will.
That's my interpretation. I do agree with Dr. Falcone that cohort development at the same time you're dealing with drug testing, specifically those drugs that are already available, is going to be essential, because you need to be able to parlay that immediately into a phase two off-label clinical trial. Then you can see pretty rapid use of that in the clinic to potentially negate these long-term effects.
For all of what we're talking about there has to be a somewhat coordinated response, and a lot of countries in the world are grappling with how to deal with it. I'm surprised at how much progress we've already made in that development, and I think we stand a good chance of leading the world in that regard.