Originally Posted by
Strenyakov
The rule is that viruses mutate down to become less lethal, especially the RNA type. The more lethal ones kill their hosts so the hosts are not around to keep spreading it, and similar mechanisms. The vaccines had short effectiveness as they were designed to have by the pharm companies that want to keep selling us billions and billions of dollars worth each year. Then came the Omicron varient that spread super fast but was not very lethal. That is what gave most of the world the resistance we now have with maybe a little help from the vaccines. That is what gave us herd immunity. It would probably be scientifically smarter to transmit the omicron than keep pumping dangerous vaccines into our arms.
All parasites tend to mutate to become commensalism or even symbiotic organisms, but demographics far more than evolution explains the decline in pathogenicity after the initial wave of infections and before omicron and subsequent strains evolved. If you look at the stats from Spain and Italy - two nations with fairly good public health stats who were hit early and hard by the original strain, fifty percent of the mortality was in individuals 85 years of age and older. Yet 85 year olds and older comprise only about 4% of the population prior to COVID
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...lowest%20share.
meaning even in the first wave their relative risk of death was 25 times that of the average Spaniard or Italian. This was always an epidemic severely skewed toward the elderly and a few high risk younger groups. . And after that first wave the demographics changed profoundly. The first wave "culled the herd" since nobody could die twice you now had fewer 85 year olds and older to even be at risk of dying and in the remaining 85 and over cohort many had already survived their first exposure and COVID was no longer "novel" to their immune systems, giving them a relative immunity they did not have for their first infection.
While yeah, it is generally the nature of novel pathogens to lose their pathogenicity as a survival trait, that is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the rapid drop off in pathogenicity of COVID. The immunizations DID WORK - not so much to stop infections or transmission as to limit harm to the infected - and the subsequent strains were less pathogenic mostly because they lacked a population with as much risk of death as the original population the first strain got to infect. And of course the lethality of the initial strain was compounded by the stupidity of certain politicians who mandated that infectious people be moved from hospital to nursing homes filled with other high risk people.
As for the pharmacy companies "designing short effectiveness", while it is not my nature to carry the water for the pharmaceutical companies (whose consolidation and buy up of competitors ought to be the target of the DOJ to a far greater extent than B6-NK in my opinion) veterinary coronavirus vaccines have been around for a long time and nobody has ever been able to get one to last any longer than a mean of nine months. It's not that I think they haven't wrung every dollar they can get out of this, but I doubt their technical ability to make a vaccine that will persist much longer than the current ones without adding adjuvants that would severely increase complication rates - and probably not even then.
But the deal was this was MOSTLY a fatal disease for the elderly and special risk population. Of the 2 million US military active duty and active reserve forces there were only about 100 deaths with the majority of those in people immune suppressed for one reason or another.