Continuing the discussion from Coronavirus COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) Thread - 2021 Breaking News:
3 Principles Now Define the Pandemic
I have seen this issue put forth by dozens of posters. Now in The Atlantic.
Effectively, the unvaccinated are not only a danger to themselves, they are a danger to the vaccinated, because just one more person becoming infected has a chance to incubate the variant that will evade vaccines.
I am questioning the truth of this belief.
I will give an example. In five card stud poker, being dealt a royal flush is rare. But it can clearly happen. Play enough games, you’ll get dealt a royal flush. However, you will never get dealt five aces, unless you’re playing with a joker. Because there aren’t five aces in the deck. You will never get five aces dealt to you no matter how long you play.
My belief on the variants is if there is a path to mutation that allows it to evade vaccines, there’s been more than enough Covid out there already. Covid can be in animals, and if you are looking for some sort of Patient Zero that is going to mutate the SuperCovid, they could be in Bangladesh or Siberia or anywhere. They don’t need to be your dumb neighbor.
There was a case of a woman, I believe reported here, who somehow never cleared Covid, never became uninfected, and was tested, and found that in her own body she was testing for the popular variants that were in other countries.
So my belief about the variants is that there doesn’t need to be a Patient Zero, that they occur because they’re a common pathway for the virus to mutate. In other words, we’ve already had more than enough Covid out there for those to happen.
Eliminating Covid ala smallpox can’t happen. However, it’s possible that Covid has no pathway to mutating to evade our vaccines.
My conclusion is either such a mutation will happen and there’s virtually nothing we can do, or it will never happen. The “billionth roll of the dice” scenario that these posts and this article is based on is the least likely occurrence.