He said the virus is now a “preventable disease”.
Professor Luke O’Neill has said that Covid-19 will “become like colds and flus in the end” due to the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines.
He told The Pat Kenny Show that the big concern will be new variants, however, he added that he believes Covid-19 is now a “preventable disease”.
“We can prevent Covid through vaccination, and we couldn’t have said that six/nine months ago really,” he said.
“So now it’s preventable, that means widespread vaccination will prevent Covid-19.
“It’ll go away, it might come back occasionally, we’ve never gotten rid of any infection, smallpox is the only [one] we’ve eliminated.
“So we’ll see spikes into the future remember, and the more you decrease the virus the less variants pop up”.
O’Neill added that the virus will “become like colds and flus” due to “a combination of vaccination and natural immunity.”
“You can imagine now the virus gradually going away in a community because of vaccination,” he said.
“It’ll become like colds and flus in the end, in that we’ll all have it and we’ll all have antibodies and we’ll be protected for years and years afterwards hopefully.
“Eventually, a combination of vaccination and natural immunity through infection will build up in the population and then that’s the way we live with it in the end I guess.”
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