Dr Gregory Poland (pictured), a top epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic, warned Covid could be with humans for so long that 'your great-great-great-grandchildren will still be getting immunized' against the virus
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. 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.
Transmission of COVID-19 has been so rampant among the vaccinated, unvaccinated and even among animals that Poland, and other experts, fear it will be impossible to control and circulate for dozens of years down the line. Pictured: A woman in Thornton, Colorado, receives a shot of a COVID-19 vaccine on March 6, 2021
'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.'
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