I'd assume that new variants arise roughly in proportion to the number of people who are infected at a given point in time. Each infection is like a lottery ticket for developing a new variant. Covid might be around for a very long time, but if we can keep the pandemic under control to the point where we have thousands rather than millions of people getting infected every day, then I'd expect the risk of variants to go way down. (Maybe this is completely right, and the mutations accumulate over time, but either way fewer infections would mean lower risk, even if it isn't exactly a linear relationship.)

The question then is can we get new infection under control all around the world? Maybe it'll happen naturally due to herd immunity in places where vaccination is rare, but I'd rather we exported more vaccines to those places. We're all in this together.

Interesting thing from that article you link is that just over 99 percent of Covid cases in the U.S. are delta variant.

I'm inclined to be skeptical of claims that any variant is bypassing vaccine protections unless we have pretty solid evidence. It's just the nature of news to speculate about worst-case scenarios.

Yeah, every flu vaccine ever made.

The Mu variant isn't competing very well against the Delta variant.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...

The seasonal influenza vaccine that is mass distributed every year isn't very sterilizing. But it has a good safety profile and some protection is better than nothing.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....

> The Mu variant isn't competing very well against the Delta variant.

I think this logic only works if a Delta variant infection provides strong protections against Mu, and a large part of the unvaccinated and vaccinated population first gets exposed to delta variant (assuming it can spread easily...can't find R estimates for some reason, which seems crazy). After all, the same was said about delta before it was prolific, and this whole thing started with one person. "It's not very present, so it won't be present" doesn't make sense, only R numbers do.

I doubt Mu is especially resistant. It was first detected in Colombia in January. The strains that will surface in 6 months will actually be resistant.

Your assumption is that vaccine production has stopped.

No, I question if the vaccines that are currently being produced will remain effective through later strains, requiring new vaccines to be developed, produced, and then redistributed to the populations of the world, in a global game of cat and mouse. Vaccinated people getting and spreading delta show a crack in the armor [1]. More than that, it goes against what was communicated to the public, about these vaccines:

> People infected with the Delta variant, including fully vaccinated people with symptomatic breakthrough infections, can transmit the virus to others.

1: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...