Delta variant is poised to acquire complete resistance to current spike vaccines [pdf]
biorxiv.org
biorxiv.org
Of course not, it's going to mutate and continue to survive in as many hosts as possible. A mutation that's more easily transmitted but less deadly (which jives with the lower death rate count lately).
There is some irony here that would be funny if it wasn't so sad. The news calls this "the pandemic of the unvaccinated". In all likelihood the delta variant came from someone vaccinated and the vaccines do next to nothing to stop transmission.
The solution we're told? More vaccines of course (no I am not making this up).
Meanwhile studies come out weekly which prove natural immunity from a previous infection is more effective than the current leaky vaccines.
Not only is natural immunity superior to artifical or vaccine induced immunity, it might be our only way out of this mess.
The current "lower" death rate of a little over 1,000 people a day is about the same as Alzheimers, stroke, and diabetes combined.
Or, it's more than flu, suicide, kidney disease, and all accidents including motor vehicle put together.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
I'm linking to the CDC partly to see if you accept non-covid stats from them.
The lower death rate in highly vaccinated states is mostly due to vaccination. Delta might be more or less deadly ceteris paribis, but it seems wildly implausible e.g. that the reduction in the CFR in the UK by about an order of magnitude is solely due to the dominance of Delta (see coronavirus.data.gov.uk).
> In all likelihood the delta variant came from someone vaccinated and the vaccines do next to nothing to stop transmission.
Delta was first detected in India at a time when very few people were vaccinated.
It is not true that the vaccine does next to nothing to stop infection. The least optimistic analyses are from Israel and give ~40% efficacy against infection which is quite far from zero.⁰ It was widely reported that viral loads in people with breakthrough infections and the unvaccinated were similar, but this ignores the question of when a test was taken and viral loads appear to decrease faster in vaccinated people.¹
> The solution we're told? More vaccines of course (no I am not making this up).
Well, yes. First of all, you seem to ignore the possibility that efficacy on endpoints other than infection might matter. Efficacy against hospitalisation and death is still high, and that is a good thing. This is such a common argument that I’m surprised you aren’t responding to it.
Second, therefore, it is prima facie a good idea to ensure that as many people as possible have that protection.
And third, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t research new vaccines which could give sterilising immunity so I’m not sure why you're so incredulous about that possibility.
> prove natural immunity from a previous infection is more effective than the current leaky vaccines.
In weighing up naturally acquired v vaccine acquired immunity you also have to take into account what happens at the start i.e. when being infected or being given the vaccination. It is preferable to be vaccinated and then reinfected than to be infected unvaccinated once.
The logic of this is a bit silly: people who successfully commit suicide are 100% successful in preventing themselves from committing suicide again. But this also shows the problem with the following reasoning:
> natural immunity superior to artifical or vaccine induced immunity, it might be our only way out of this mess.
Unless we succeed in finding a vaccine that gives sterilising immunity, Covid is probably going to be endemic. So the question is whether one wants to be infected for the first time completely Covid naïve or not (i.e. via vaccination). Only vaccines make naturally acquired herd immunity vaguely palatable in terms of the number of deaths and hospitalisations, knock-on effects via reduction in healthcare capacity, &c.
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...