The mRNA vaccines have a turnaround of only a few weeks to produce a variant booster, so this is less of a concern than with older vaccine technologies. Moderna and Pfizer are currently trialing their SA strain booster that was formulated and produced in under a month [1][2].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/24/moderna-covid-vaccine-booste... [2] https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/25/is-more-simply-better-wh...

It takes months to manufacture and distribute though.

It won't help if the virus mutates to a form that can escape the immune system.

Big pharma has deep pockets and believe me, this is part of their plan. Vaccine passports are the big pharma wet dream come to life. For a disease that 99.85% recover from.

99+%* recover when there's available medical care. There wasn't nearly enough for the entire population if it were allowed to spread unchecked. That's why most countries are going to vaccinate as much as they can until there's enough herd immunity.

* The 0.15% number is absurd when larger percentages of the US and UK population have died from Corona. Even if 100% were infected, IFR would have to be larger.

For something that they're selling at cost? Your conspiracy detector is a bit off there.

You seem to be subdividing into "lived therefore recovered" and "died therefore did not recover". You're ignoring both long-COVID which people can recover from after months and long term organ damage seen even in outwardly asymptomatic people.

Lies and hate is all I read in your comment. Your numbers are made up entirely.

The more people get vaccinated, the fewer the infections.

The fewer the infections, the fewer the mutations.

The fewer the mutations, the fewer the vaccine resistant variants.

The fewer the vaccine resistant variants, the fewer the need for new vaccines.

The fewer the need for new vaccines, the fewer the need for people to get vaccinated.

Repeat.

It's hard to predict when it will happen, but infections will collapse the same way they spread, but only if people get vaccinated and retain some discipline until the collapse.

The problem with your logic is that all it took is a handful of infections in China to trigger a global pandemic. Even a "few" infections of a deadly resistant strain could prove to be problematic. That said, we do not have a full understanding of this disease yet. Its better to err on the side of caution - but not paranoia :)

Those infections in China were a problem because there was no sufficient partial immunity in the world's population. New mutations will have to overcome that partial immunity (through vaccination or prior infection), or mutate very far, which is very rare.

> New mutations will have to overcome that partial immunity (through vaccination or prior infection), or mutate very far, which is very rare.

We don't know whether it is rare or not. And we don't know how long immunity lasts. The Flu hits us every year.

We do know that "far" mutations are more rare just by simple mathematics. The higher the number of mutated genes, the lower the probability for that mutation.

Wait, are you basing your argument in immunology or mathematics?

The number of mutations in each subsequent generation is not strictly linked with the ability to evade the host immune system. Most mutations are either neutral or harmful to the virus itself. All you need is a single mutation that is beneficial - which is what happened in one variant of Covid - 20I/501Y.V1, most notably a mutation in the spike - S:N501Y.

Secondly, we do know that rates of spontaneous mutations are very high in RNA viruses, or more specifically, because of the way RNA polymerase functions.

Lastly, as a nitpick, a gene is a region of DNA - which is not at play here. But I got the gist of what you wanted to say.

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Source: works in biotech

> The fewer the mutations, the fewer the vaccine resistant variants. > The fewer the vaccine resistant variants, the fewer the need for new vaccines

Aren’t you committing a logical error here? There will need to be new vaccines as long as there is at least one escape variant. The “fewer the need” is really a binary 0 or 1, and you haven’t done anything to show that your “getting vaccinated and retaining some discipline until the collapse” gets us from a 1 to a 0. There’s a time component as well.

But yeah, it’s a neat story that gets shots in arms.

Mutations are happening all the time anyway, but the rate of mutation matters. This is all one big game of statistics.

Plagues end quickly all the time once conditions are no longer able to support it. Take a look at the current mouse plague in eastern Australia right now for a real world example. It's happened before but each time it collapsed as quickly as it came.

Statistically we will cross the threshold where the ecosystem is no longer favorable for the spread of covid and the plague will collapse. It will move back into the background noise just like the millions of other potential diseases that aren't currently causing a global pandemic.

The real danger are holdouts who can't or refuse to get vaccinated for whatever reason. If there's enough of them and they live close enough together to support a viable ecosystem that very well could provide a reservoir for covid to continue thriving and causing problems until they achieve herd immunity.

> The “fewer the need” is really a binary 0 or 1

I can see several ways in which this is not true.

For one, several different variants might need to be handled with several different vaccines. Vaccines might also not work perfectly on a variant, but they might confer some protection, leading to overall less total viral particles produced, reducing the probability of an effective mutation.

This is how the flu shot works. I don't see how this would be that big of a deal, we get shots for previous pandemic strains every year.

> we get shots for previous pandemic strains every year.

That's not exactly how the flu shot works. They make an educated guess as to which strain will become most widespread, then develop the corresponding vaccine. Years that the flu shot isn't as effective is when they guess the wrong strain.

Yep, and next year is going to be a total shot in the dark for people formulating flu vaccines. Nobody's getting flu because COVID precautions are effective against flu, too. But, pigs and birds are, and their flu viruses jump over to us pretty readily.

My guess is that next year's flu season is going to be a lot worse than more recent ones because of this.

On the bright side, the practice we've (hopefully) had with masks, hand washing, and personal space should hopefully carry over to flu seasons in the future. If it does get severe, then we know what to do.

Whether we do it, though, is another question altogether.

Yeah, I wouldn't count on people actually doing it, either. Especially when a large segment of the population is convinced that mask mandates are a form of tyranny.

For obvious reasons, you're not going to see mask mandates for flu season. It's simply not contagious enough. I think there will be more social pressure to wear masks when you're not feeling well and an increased acceptance of staying home when sick though.

Sure, but do you really think people who won't wear a mask when it's literally against the law not to will wear one voluntarily?

I think it'll be more a matter of "I don't want to get sick and I'm your manager, so {put on a mask,stay at home until you're no longer sick} or stay at home forever".

This is indeed how it works for the healthcare industry; when I was doing hospital IT, my choices during flu season were either 1) vaccinate, 2) wear a mask, or 3) find a new line of work. I picked the first one.

My guess is that next year's flu season is cancelled too. It doesn't take much to push the R from slightly above 1 to slightly below 1.

Just putting a mask on half the symptomatic infected people (or even better, getting them to stay at home) would probably do the trick.

Also, the flu has to start from a very low level. Might miss this flu season completely.

Hmmm, my understanding is that the flu vaccines are basically built on the seasonality of the flu -- the southern & northern hemisphere's flu seasons run six months opposite each other, so you basically take the strains that were biggest in the southern hemisphere during its season and vaccinate the northern against them, and vice-versa six months later.

Do we have any sign yet on whether the COVID-season would be expected to run on a similar schedule?

Not really, no. The vaccines developed a year ago are mostly effective enough against the strains circulating now though, so it may work out for the better.

(the "spike" that the vaccines target is important to the virus, so changes to it often make it much less infectious or whatever, and we don't really know how much room is has to both escape the vaccine triggered immunity and stay highly infectious)

It is a bit different now because mRNA vaccines are much quicker to develop. It is somewhat realistic we can keep having up to date vaccines.

Having to pay a tax to a private company to get a mandatory yearly medical procedure is not my idea of fun. So now you get the flu and covid shot every year. Next 5 years, new bug, new vaccine, you do three ? And of course we have no long term data on cumulative shots effects, or interractions between various shots together, with other medicines, etc.

Doing anything like this systematically should be though out carefully.

Doing my first 10 vaccines felt like buying software licence in the 90'. I fear that the new ones will be like those sucky Saas subscriptions.

Can someone enlighten me on the logic of this sort of thinking?

I think people are very worried since only richer countries are getting significant amounts of vaccine currently, poorer countries are in the backlog for vaccines, so we most likely see some kind of mutation from those countries by the end of the year and maybe at least a couple more years of lockdowns and new booster vaccines around the globe. I think this is far from over.