The biggest worry would be a new vaccine-resistant variant at this point, right? From my limited understanding, the big biotech companies involved can respond relatively quickly, but it may become a game of whack-a-mole.
[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...
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
My guess is that next year's flu season is going to be a lot worse than more recent ones because of this.
Whether we do it, though, is another question altogether.
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.
Do we have any sign yet on whether the COVID-season would be expected to run on a similar schedule?
(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)
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.