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Comment by rcpt | Hacker News Reader

there's no race. If this virus can mutate into something that renders the vaccine ineffective it will. Brazil and Mexico and the rest of the developing world will give it ample opportunity no matter how quickly we roll out the current drugs. It took decades to hunt down smallpox.

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There is a race because the more people that are infected with the current strains, the more chances that the virus will have to evolve into newer strains.

It is also believed that new strains are more likely to appear in places where the pandemic is out of control, with a large number of people currently infected and also a large number of people that already have some immunity to previous versions of the disease. This provides the selective pressure that can lead to new variants arising. Therefore, getting the pandemic under control using vaccinations and other measures is key to reducing the number of new variants that pop up.

that just means it might evolve slightly slower, not that it won't ever happen. it 100% will evolve and 100% will evade the vaccine. we've understood about evolution for a very long time, but everyone's in denial atm.

even wearing masks did fuck all because it just evolved anyway. it ain't gonna matter when you aren't wearing them.

There certainly is a race. The slower we go the more spread. The more spread, the more variation. The more variation, the more likelihood of a vaccine-resistant strain taking hold.

Even if it’s a long-term certainty, much better to be well-equipped to respond to it, which we simply are not at the moment.

My point is that this virus spreads unbelievably fast and even with the most optimistic vaccine scenarios it has literally billions of hosts in the developing world to infect who have 0 zero chance of getting a shot anytime in the next few years.

Of course the vaccines might be good enough to ward off infection from all future variants but that's just luck.

Isn’t it almost certainly the case that the ‘unstoppable’ thing it turns in to will basically be more akin to a general cold though? The thing that makes this virus deadly is also the thing we are coding against in the vaccine.

Not necessarily. For example, some of the more recent SARS-CoV-2 variants spread more easily because the virus causes a more severe infection, which is transmissable for a longer period of time. It's also not a guarantee that the virus will evolve into something weaker. There are serious diseases like measles and smallpox that have circulated for thousands of years while remaining as deadly as they ever were. Sometimes, the disease not being as deadly after a while can be a result of natural selection selecting for more resistant individuals (after many deaths), not of natural selection selecting for less deadly pathogens.

> For example, some of the more recent SARS-CoV-2 variants spread more easily because the virus causes a more severe infection, which is transmissable for a longer period of time.

That's purely speculation at this point, while epidemiology shows us that viruses which are more fatal tend to be less transmissible and vice-versa.

It can be more complicated than that, because in some circumstances increased virulence might also provide an evolutionary advantage for the pathogen. This article from snopes.com has a nice summary of the competing views: https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/02/01/will-coronavirus-real...

"""The trade-off model recognises that pathogen virulence will not necessarily limit the ease by which a pathogen can transmit from one host to another. It might even enhance it. Without the assumed evolutionary cost to virulence, there is no reason to believe that disease severity will decrease over time. Instead, May and Anderson proposed that the optimal level of virulence for any given pathogen will be determined by a range of factors, such as the availability of susceptible hosts, and the length of time between infection and symptom onset.

There is little or no direct evidence that virulence decreases over time. While newly emerged pathogens, such as HIV and Mers, are often highly virulent, the converse is not true. There are plenty of ancient diseases, such as tuberculosis and gonorrhoea, that are probably just as virulent today as they ever were."""

> There are serious diseases like measles and smallpox that have circulated for thousands of years while remaining as deadly as they ever were

Right and our vaccines have maintained efficacy against these things.

> It's also not a guarantee that the virus will evolve into something weaker

No but it is almost certainly the case if the past is anything to go on

What your saying is a likely long-term outcome. But the reason we see milder viruses circulating as an “end-game” is just because we don’t tend to deal with non-threats. There is no rule that mild strains are a given outcome of mutation. You just won’t see super-deadly variants last long-term because it quickly turns into an us or them battle that we have so far been able to win.

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