NEW DELHI: No fourth wave will occur in the country unless an unexpected variant that behaves differently comes up, said top virologist T Jacob John on Saturday, adding that India should not worry about Covid spikes seen in South Asia, especially in China and South Korea.
“Today, with three waves behind us and with Omicron gone, I do not understand how fear needs to be inculcated into human beings and for what purpose. I don’t believe in predicting a wave based on mathematical modelling.
There is nothing to fear the fourth wave,” said John at an event to release his book, Polio — the eradication imbroglio — the disorder and its remedy, written jointly with Dhanya Dharmapalan, a Mumbai-based pediatrician. Also present were Dr Krishna Ella and Suchitra Ella, founders of Bharat Biotech, the producer of Covaxin.
Speaking about the fourth wave hitting India in June, as predicted by Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur researchers, John, a former director of the Indian Council for Medical Research’s Centre of Advanced Research in Virology, said, “The fourth wave will occur in the country if an unexpected variant behaves differently comes up or if any new variant overtakes Omicron locally in small places then you have to worry about its consequences.”
The retired professor and former head of the departments of clinical virology and microbiology at CMC Vellore said the third wave had ended in the country and had entered the endemic phase. “Unless an unexpected variant that behaves differently from alpha, beta, gamma, or Omicron comes, there will be no fourth wave,” he added.