Stymied by COVID’s changes, a UNC scientist accepts that it will be a long fight

The website at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health provides this description of Timothy Sheahan: “An expert virologist whose research is focused on understanding emerging viral diseases and developing new means to stop them.”

In 2019, those words would be enough. Now, more than two years into a COVID-19 pandemic with the coronavirus surging again in yet another variation, Sheahan’s work description needs a rewrite: “An expert virologist frustrated by an emerging new virus that keeps evading science’s ability to stop it.”

“I’m just surprised by the virus’ capacity for change. It is changing more than I ever thought it ever would or could,” Sheahan told me last week. “I chose to study coronaviruses because I thought they were interesting, and now I think they are even more interesting.”

And even more infectious.

The omicron subvariant known as BA.5 is exploding across the nation. Its transmissibility is so strong it breaks through the protections provided by vaccines, vaccine boosters and the immunity of prior infection.

On the day I spoke with Sheahan, the White House had announced that even COVID-cautious President Joe Biden had tested positive. Sheahan, a 45-year-old detective tracking the shape-shifting virus, fell victim to it himself three weeks ago.

“I had a fever and a scratchy throat and a bunch of lower respiratory symptoms,” he said. Even taking the antiviral drug Paxlovid, nine days passed before he tested negative.

“It’s frustrating for me that we still have this super annoying virus that is complicating everybody’s lives,” he said.

Sheahan has more reason than most to be annoyed. He, like so many others, thought science could vanquish this bug. In the first year of the deadly pandemic, Sheahan and a team of about 15 researchers donned their protective suits with sealed hoods connected to a respirator and worked intensely at the the UNC lab to develop COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.

During that first year of grueling research, Sheahan wouldn’t even step foot in a grocery store. If he got infected, the whole team would have to quarantine for weeks.

“We were trying to accelerate our work by just working a lot, but sprinting for so long was just wearing everyone down,” he said. “So we’re trying to take more of a marathon approach. It was just unsustainable.”

Two years into the pandemic, Sheahan, like everyone else tired of hiding from COVID, let his guard down and traveled on a plane. He tested positive for the virus after his trip, though he can’t be sure where he was infected.

Now his drive to end COVID-19 has turned into the acceptance that it will, like the flu, circulate in waves but never go away. “For me,” he said, “it’s not whether it will become an endemic disease, it’s just when.”

His acceptance is not resignation. Progress is being made. The vaccines are blunting COVID-19’s effects. “Everybody is going to get it eventually, but you can prevent yourself from getting super sick,” he said.

Sheahan’s work focuses on developing drugs to treat COVID-19. Treatments are getting better, he said, but there needs to be a variety of drugs. If there’s just one, this wily virus will likely develop a resistance to it.

Perhaps the most promising way to take on COVID, he said, would be to develop a vaccine that can be inhaled. That would create a barrier where the airborne virus invades the body, he said. Researchers elsewhere are working on that.

Scientists seeking ways to stop the spread of the virus have been through a draining two years. But Sheahan said the flood of research money and the global scientific focus on this particular virus has rapidly expanded knowledge. The next “novel” virus will meet a scientific world better equipped to fight it.

“There are a lot of awful things that happened over the last two years and the pandemic has been depressing at times,” he said. “But at the same time, the work that we have been doing has led to some really good things for public health.”

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com