Unless we could magically get the cases to zero this problem isn’t going away. Mask mandates will slow things, but eventually you’ll need enough people to actually get infected to drop the replication rate.
Evolution is incremental. To become vaccine evading, the virus has to have a host it can replicate it, and a host that is a resistant target.
In fact it needs a big pool of them, since once infected develop immunity they no longer produce trial mutations.
So you need a pool of the unvaccinated, coming into frequently, regular contact with the vaccinated in order for any specific vaccine escape to evolve.
This is because, any incremental improvement needs to become a population dominant strain within the unvaccinated population: that you survived in a vaccinated person for a little bit is irrelevant if at the end of the day every virus with that trait dies without spreading.
Even if you successfully do spread from a vaccinated host, you need to either land in another vaccinated host (who then spreads you around: so isolation measures are effective), and while you're doing this you need to develop a better escape system: not guaranteed, because if overall viral loading or time to immunity is shorter, that's less time to generate variants.
But...a good way to optimize this, is to just spread to a pool of unvaccinated people. With luck you retain the vaccine-escape mutations, become dominant within the unvaccinated pool, and then get lots of opportunities to try and infect vaccinated people and get a little further.
This, incidentally, why viral evolution tends to consist of "the virus jumped between species several times" - because crossing a species barrier requires ongoing persistent contact between a host you can replicate it, and one you're trying to cross over into.
Can you please explain more?
Why can't both hosts A and B both be vaccinated folks?
Is'nt there a 3rd category - those who have immunity via past infection? How do it work in that case?
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If what you say above is correct, then why do we see new strains in flu?
Has'nt pretty much every person on earth been exposed to flu or vaccinated against it?
If 1 vaccinated person infects another say 3, but then those people fail to infect anyone else - then it doesn't actually matter what selective advantages that viral strain had - 100% of the virus has died out.
But if the same chain terminates in the vaccinated people then infecting an unvaccinated person...then the new mutation escapes and potentially becomes dominant within the reservoir (unvaccinated people) and a failure to spread through the vaccinated population doesn't lead to the destruction of the mutant strain.
the next question is what happens to those with acquired immunity, and why are they being forced to be vaccinated?
I see many studies that show that their levels of antibodies seem to be even better than ones from the vaccines.
If that is happening, and the R0 from vaccinated to vaccinated is above 1, aren't we creating immense evolutionary pressure to defeat the current vaccines?
Given enough time, a virus will tend evolve to become more infectious period.
Somebody else could confirm this, but it seems to me that the current known variants of concern are not responses to vaccination.
Or how the flu hits every single year.
Right from wikipedia.
Epidemiology as a field did not publish papers or study the idea of "natural" herd immunity till last year when politicians started throwing the term around and a whole lot of researcher's scrambled to see whether this insanity had any merit.
Of which the answer is what we already knew just spelled out more specifically: no, this doesn't actually happen in the wild without vaccines, because it's literally just spreading the virus. Viruses burn themselves out after infecting basically everyone, provided immunity is long lasting.