Which failure of hope creates the dystopian future that encourages the horror-movie like mutation creating a vaccine resistant strain causing us to start all over?
If we knew that, then we could totally make it happen. Give it that can do attitude.
To be honest though a true vaccine resistant strain would likely still be a disaster even if we get 90 or 95% of the population vaccinated.
There are a lot of variables. You are more likely to see a strain for which vaccines are less effective as opposed to zero effectiveness. (Once you get to zero effectiveness, you're more likely talking about a whole new disease).
But secondly, even assuming a more resistant strain emerged, that new strain might be less transmissible or may simply be less dangerous.
There was some amount of sarcasm in that post. See the
I'm not worried about some variant that shows up tomorrow that's vaccine resistant. I'm not even worried that some variant that shows up tomorrow vaccine less effective and is the first step down that path, one vaccine less effective variant after another becoming dominant until we're starting over.
Which also means, I'm not worried about the abstract "there will always be variants, we must be freaked out FOREVER AND EVER, oh my!". Assuming we continue to deal with spread, these worst case scenarios are extremely unlikely, not enough to worry about.
I don’t disagree that the more we allow the virus to spread the more we risk being the cause of a mutation instead of just a potential victim but that’s why we have to hope that the inflection point that starts to drive cases down is coming very soon and it’s thanks to the vaccines with a little help from some natural immunity.
Ultimately, we want to reduce the disease as much as possible, in order to reduce the risk of mutation. Because mutation introduces unknowns -- And we don't like unknowns. A mutation could make things worse, and therefore we avoid it. But the majority of mutations are more likely to have no meaningful impact, or could even make the disease less dangerous.
This the real worry, and it's subtlety different, but in an important way. Do everything right (or at least close to right), and we're pretty good.
The worry is about what we're doing. That we're NOT going to do something right. Instead, we're going to create a plan that sounds great in the short term, but in the long term actively creates the conditions to encourage, cultivate, nurture, select for the variant with the worst possible impact.
This is an entirely different concern. It's only tangentially a variant concern. It's much more a policy and actions issue.
Given all our other decision making, making the wrong choice here for short term gains ignoring log term risk isn't really a stretch. It's like everyone is an MBA looking at quarterly returns and ignoring the 5 year growth plan.
Which just get's us back to:
If we knew that, then we could totally make it happen. Give it that can do attitude.
