‘Pirola’ JN.1 is the probable future of COVID pandemic, experts warn—but you didn’t hear it from the WHO

Dubbed Omicron by the World Health Organization, it contained more than 30 mutations that separated it from the original virus—alterations that gave it veritable wings. In short order, its lineage would become the only one of consequence, its progeny able to out-compete all other viral combinations evolution sent its way.

Omicron was the beginning of an era—one that, despite its outlandish success in infecting and reinfecting the public, would see the end of both global and national pandemic emergency statuses. For more than two years, COVID and Omicron were all but synonymous. 

Now, as the world enters its fifth year of COVID, the calculus may have changed, experts say. The new, highly mutated COVID variant JN.1—dubbed “Pirola” by volunteer variant trackers—has achieved global dominance. And like Omicron, it came flying out of left field. 

Most new variants differ from each other in just one or two small ways. But with its 30-plus additional mutations, Pirola is as genetically divergent from Omicron as Omicron was from the original COVID.

In short, JN.1 is, by all appearances, a game changer. Most—if not all—variants of consequence for the foreseeable future could very well evolve from it, experts tell Fortune—until the virus throws another black swan-style curveball, anyway. 

Whether the WHO will recognize it with a Greek letter—in what would be its first designation in over two years—remains to be seen. 

As of Jan. 3, it had not—and some experts say that’s a mistake.

‘A very serious evolution of the virus’

Among them: Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and a leading authority on the virus. 

When cases of JN.1…