Lessons from a self-terminating pandemic: Vaccination, vitamin A deficiency, and a brief epidemiological overview

Declared a pandemic by WHO in March 2020, COVID-19 infected more than 460 million people, causing the death of more than six million people. With the Omicron variant becoming the dominant form, COVID-19 ended on its own, leaving behind serious socioeconomic traumas and dozens of chronic inflammatory diseases. With the transformation of COVID-19 into seasonal flu, it is predicted that it will no longer cause serious socioeconomic and health problems on a societal scale. During the pandemic process, it was tried to stop the epidemic with extraordinary measures such as hygiene, quarantine, closure of schools, travel restrictions, filiation practices, financial and psychosocial support, and effective use of mass media. These measures undoubtedly slowed the pace of the epidemic somewhat. It was anticipated that vaccines would not provide long-term protection against COVID-19 due to mutations that develop so frequently in SARS-CoV-2. Despite this, researchers focused heavily on vaccine development throughout the process. With the vaccines developed in this process, at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine was given to approximately 4.9 billion people as of April 2021. The dictation of vaccines as the only and most effective solution in the fight against the pandemic prevented the detection of micronutrient deficiencies such as vitamin A deficiency, which facilitated the epidemic, on a societal scale and other alternative solutions. Some studies show that vitamin A deficiency may have played a role in the transmission of COVID-19 and the development of the severe clinical picture. The pandemic is coming to an end before the main reason or reasons underlying the fact that COVID-19, the biggest epidemic of our age, mostly affects western societies and is fatal in the elderly population living in big cities, are not clarified. In order to find the answer to this intriguing question, community-based dietary habits and epidemiological scans for micronutrient deficiency such as Vitamin A deficiency were not conducted. At a time when people began to lose their confidence in COVID-19 vaccines, SARS-CoV-2 underwent a heavy mutation, as the evolutionary process required, and COVID-19 turned into a flu-like infection.