This makes the huge assumption that the variants stop. The Mu variant, which appears to be vaccine resistant, is here already: https://www.newsweek.com/mu-variant-which-may-vaccine-resist...
My question is, have we ever mass distributed a non-sterilizing vaccine before?
The question then is can we get new infection under control all around the world? Maybe it'll happen naturally due to herd immunity in places where vaccination is rare, but I'd rather we exported more vaccines to those places. We're all in this together.
Interesting thing from that article you link is that just over 99 percent of Covid cases in the U.S. are delta variant.
I'm inclined to be skeptical of claims that any variant is bypassing vaccine protections unless we have pretty solid evidence. It's just the nature of news to speculate about worst-case scenarios.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...
The seasonal influenza vaccine that is mass distributed every year isn't very sterilizing. But it has a good safety profile and some protection is better than nothing.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....
I think this logic only works if a Delta variant infection provides strong protections against Mu, and a large part of the unvaccinated and vaccinated population first gets exposed to delta variant (assuming it can spread easily...can't find R estimates for some reason, which seems crazy). After all, the same was said about delta before it was prolific, and this whole thing started with one person. "It's not very present, so it won't be present" doesn't make sense, only R numbers do.
> People infected with the Delta variant, including fully vaccinated people with symptomatic breakthrough infections, can transmit the virus to others.
1: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...