This has indeed been predicted by various experts but almost completely ignored. As seen in the comment below the strategy now is to blame those who are critical of our single minded vaccination strategy.

Completely untrue. The reservoir of selfish unvaccinated individuals is what is providing a place for Covid to hide and mutate. Vax critics were silenced and ridiculed because they are dangerous deceivers who need to be called out and held to account for the consequences of their lies.

So far, the "reservoir of selfish unvaccinated individuals" that the virus has mutated in is people who literally could not get vaccinated because there weren't enough vaccines available. The most important variants so far have showed up in the UK before any vaccines were approved, South Africa during their vaccine clinical trials (rendering the vaccine they were planning on using effectively useless), and India which is just too big to vaccinate quickly at current production levels.

> selfish unvaccinated individuals

"selfish" implies you think there is some benefit to those individuals in declining it. What do you think that is?

You fail to take into account. that they might be stupid and selfish.

How can you be sure of the absence of long term negative consequences?

Hundreds of millions have been vaccinated, there are like double digit cases of issues (per million)

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...

Your risk index is poor.

Like conversely, your chance of getting hit by a car is 1 in 5000, so I guess you shouldn't ever leave your house again.

https://www.reference.com/world-view/odds-getting-hit-car-81....

You obviously need to check the database again then, because there are remarkably few cases where the person had a adverse reaction to the mRNA-based vaccine. Furthermore in the majority of those cases (of which were already slim to begin with), they are usually something like anaphylactic shock a.k.a. an allergic reaction which they can deal with at the time that the vaccine is administered.

It infuriates me that "armchair experts" who likely lack even a bachelors degree in STEM much less epidemiology think that they know better than the majority of medical professionals.

They are more likely to follow their advice of the mechanic who tells them that their catalytic converter needs to be replaced than a medical professional who has nearly a decade of specialized training.

That's not something that's ever been a problem with vaccines before.

Even if you have unshakeable faith in this evidence-free perversion of biological theory, nobody was claiming the vaccines will fail without 100% adoption last year when they launched. Their reception would have been rather different if that had been claimed, wouldn't it? So you can either believe this is true, in which case governments and pharma firms deceived people about the nature of the 'vaccine', or you can believe it's false and they didn't. But you can't believe it's true and it's the other people who are deceivers. That makes no logical sense.

It's a general issue with every vaccine against an illness that has a reservoir. The reservoir can be other species (birds and various other animals in case of influenza) or it can be human populations that for various reasons have not eliminated the spread of the illness yet (measles in countries that refuse or make it difficult to vaccinate, polio if not completely eradicated yet). In this reservoir the agent has opportunity to mutate, and it can never be excluded that at some point it makes inroads into populations again where it was eradicated before.

Global eradication of diseases has been achieved with smallpox and bovine rinderpest precisely because they had no natural reservoir and all vulnerable populations could be vaccinated. With Coronaviruses the situation is not so simple, but it should at least be possible to eradicate the currently relevant variant.