> Because mass vaccination combined with a vaccine that does not necessarily prevent infection and transmission creates selective pressure that is likely to further enhance the fitness of the virus and will lead to variants that escape the immune response in both vaccinated and naturally infected individuals.
And yet, the Delta variant evolved in an 100% unvaccinated population - and is quite happily punching through some of the protections afforded by vaccines, despite not having any evolutionary pressure to do so.
> "The speed at which nAb resistance develops in the population increases substantially as the number of infected individuals increases, suggesting that complementary strategies to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission that exert specific pressure on other proteins (e.g., antiviral prophylactics) or that do not exert a specific selective pressure on the virus (e.g., high-efficiency air filtration, masking, ultraviolet air purification) are key to reducing the risk of immune escape"
Doesn't this mean that the problem is in having a large number of infected individuals? Which is exactly what happens when a virus sweeps through the unvaccinated population - see, delta.
Also, since Covid and its variants seems to happily re-infect people who have already had it, the same evolutionary pressures will still be present, as long as there's a large reservoir of sick people, regardless of whether they are rubbing shoulders with vaccinated individuals, or 'caught it eight months ago' individuals.
We have two broad options for reducing the number of dangerous COVID mutations.
1. Harsh lockdowns, Australia/NZ/China style, to bring cases down. It works, but everyone hates it.
2. Mass vaccination, that gets us to herd immunity against the most prevalent strains of COVID, so that we no longer have millions of active cases. We're not there with 50% of the population vaccinated. We might be there if we were at 85%.
Since you seem to think that #2 is not the solution, what is your plan for stopping the evolution of the virus? #1?