New Year Greetings from the desk of FIMSA President

2022-01-04Source:FIMSA

Dear friends,

The time keeps passing and history is created with every passing moment. There are always many good things and some bad ones that get inscribed on our brains, never to be forgotten. One such thing during the last couple of years that will make stories for the coming generations is the emergence of SARS-CoV2 and more so, how the human race fought with it. The devastation and frustrations during the last two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, wave after wave, have been unprecedented, yet the positive side should not be ignored. The positive part was the grit and the hard work done by the health care workers and scientific community to upscale the innovations and new products that were important to face this challenge. These include understanding the molecular structure of virus and rapid development of diagnostic kits, the PEP kits and sanitisers to start with, and then coming out with many highly efficacious vaccines in a record period of time. These innovations lead to reduction in the morbidity as well as mortality rates and I have no hesitation to add that the Immunologists around the world played their roles to the best of expectations of the community at large. Although, we as immunologists do understand that the optimum benefit of vaccines can only be achieved if all the eligible individuals throughout the world are fully vaccinated, which remains a huge challenge. The major hurdles to achieve this goal of complete vaccination are not one but multiple, which includes the vaccine hesitancy to start with, then shortage of vaccine doses and also the 'vaccine inequality'. It is heartening to find that there is a 'global political will' to face these challenges to some extent and with world health body (WHO) playing its pivotal role, some countries like India have come forward to upscale the vaccine production so as not only to cover its huge population load but also to provide doses to many of the resource-poor countries through WHO Global vaccine distribution program.

The changing genetic makeup and emergence of mutant variants of this virus is a major threat that the world in general and scientific community in particular face today. This is because the virus tends to replicate and mutate more in individuals who are not protected or are immunocompromised. There could be no better time to be an immunologist as we have a huge task to perform and history has witnessed that many such previous challenges have been successfully handled, so there is no doubt why this wouldn't be.

I wish you all a very happy and prosperous New Year, 2022 and hope this dreaded virus will be eliminated in the new year with the concerted efforts of our scientists and health care workers.

31st December, 2021