We have surplus vaccines and the unvaccinated are being hit hard. Isn’t this just Darwinian?

>As bad as the winter surge was, Springfield’s health-care workers shared a common purpose of serving their community, Steve Edwards, the president and CEO of CoxHealth, told me. But now they’re “putting themselves in harm’s way for people who’ve chosen not to protect themselves,” he said.

Unfortunately it also hits the rest of the community hard.

On one hand, I don't want to put medical professionals through another wave, but on the other, we can't have on and off lockdowns and mask mandates for the next year while we wait for the unvaccinated to either get vaccinated or contract coivd.

The people most affected are well beyond child rearing age.

Ah. So older people don't contribute to Child-rearing now? They don't adopt? Volunteer time and experience training youth and ensuring that an accurate history and culture is transferred to younger generations?

For that matter, explain to me the implicit value judgement going on there. You're obviously saying something about the reproductively inviable regardless of age.

So would you like to add some context so you can avoid putting across some of the unstated implications there?

The OP asked, "isn't this Darwinian?" And the answer is that, no, it isn't and the question doesn't make any sense, because the people most likely to die from COVID have already had whatever biological kids they're going to have.

It absolutely is. The virus will kill off the Missourians who are susceptible to it, eventually leaving Missourians with genetic resistance to the disease, while other populations won't develop that resistance due to using the vaccine.

When, for whatever reason, there is an interruption in the ability to provide the vaccine, huge numbers of the non-Missourian population will die off, and the rest of them will be so weakened that the Missourians will be able to overwhelm them, take their land, and march them off to Oklahoma.

As a Missourian myself, I can reveal that this was always the plan.

sure, but virus folloe a quicker evolutinary path and allowing it to have ample hosts gives it ample time to evolve and potentially mutate to a lineage thats more deadly, not vulnerable to the vaccine and we all start the process oer again.

evolution doesnt care about the morality of letting people die.

I’d feel a lot more comfortable with this line of reasoning if somebody could put numbers on it. This rhetoric makes sense, but is it rooted in reality?

What’s the expected rate of variant emergence under different scenarios? Can we get it down to near-zero, or are we talking like 30,000 escape variants to 30? Since it only takes one, clearly in the latter case further restrictions and mandates would be futile.

Somebody should be able to run simulations and come up with reasonable estimates.

If we had simulations that could tell us how contagious a disease would be just from its genome, that would be earth-shattering. But since we don't that's not really the sort of question a simulation can solve. But I think it should be concerning that at least two related coronaviruses (SARS and MERS) turned out to have very high fatality rates in humans.

I napkin mathed a rate of one notable strain every 100 million infections. The rates higher than one every billion. And lower than one per 10 million. Also read a paper that mentioned the idea that the reason people get reinfected by cold viruses every couple of years is because that's how long it takes the virus to evolve to escape immunity.

If you except roughly those numbers. If you got the infection rate down to 1 million / year. You'd see a new strain every 100 years. As it is we're seeing a new strain every couple of months.

It's just as likely, perhaps more likely, that it will mutate to a less deadly form.

Over the very long term. But that's because people who get more deadly forms tend not to create as many new cases on account of them being dead. The long term trend isn't very comforting for those people, I imagine.

Would slowing the spread through measures give it more opportunities to accumulate mutations that help it break through immunity and vaccines? I'm somewhat worried prevention efforts led to delta. The virus would have naturally spread fairly quickly, and alternate universe delta would have had to adapt to reinfect people who already have immunity. The delta we have was selected to spread, and now it's facing populations with no immunity.

Good riddance!