“Variants are very common, and they happen with all viruses,” he said. This is starting to overwhelm the hospital systems in some states. He said the Delta variant is more infectious than the variants it knocked out and is spreading through unvaccinated populations and places where people have gone back to normal, behaving as they did pre-pandemic. What people should be talking about, he believes, is “vaccine misinformation” that is preventing large numbers of people from getting vaccinated. He said that the world has dealt with pandemics before, like influenza, and “they didn’t turn into a super virus that wiped everyone out…It’s slightly ridiculous.” “It’s scary enough” so people up the ante like it’s a “zombie movie.” In reality, an extremely lethal mutation of COVID probably won’t happen, he said. Kamil said he would put the chances of a doomsday variant “at almost zero.” He thinks the talk derives from the psychological aspects of the pandemic. It’s more of a morbid curiosity” that people have, he said. The doomsday variant talk is “extremely unlikely.

He believes a doomsday variant is extremely unlikely and that people should be talking instead about the importance of getting vaccinated because variants can develop when large numbers of people do not. He leads COVID-19 sequencing at LSU Health Shreveport and his research lab focuses on virus biology, using molecular genetics and pharmacology. Jeremy Kamil, who is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Louisiana State University (LSU) Health Shreveport.

Doomsday covid