Originally Posted by
ankietyjoe
Well assuming you're responding to GaryA's response about the efficacy of a vaccine and the necessity of further lockdown's etc, it's still really a precautionary numbers game.
If there's one thing 'they might not be telling us', it's the possibility of catastrophic mutation. I think it's a bit of a misnomer that the primary reason for a vaccine is to prevent mass infection of the current strain, it's actually possibly more about squashing infection rates to a low enough level where mutation is far less likely. In effect, they want the current pandemic level infection events to be removed from the equation as fast as possible so that the virus doesn't have a chance to quickly mutate and create a fresh, new, uncontrolled global re-pandemic. This was the concern with the Belgian mink infections.
After a few years this becomes less of a problem anyway as natural immunity builds up and the general population has a built in 'body memory' of this type of Covid and how to deal with it. It's the same reason that the old fashioned flu doesn't cause the same kind of issues that we're seeing with Covid, in that humanity has a pretty good built in defense to it anyway.
Because we don't currently have that with Covid, the potential for exponential rates of infection are high, and that's what could prove unmanageable for health services. If lockdowns and vaccinations didn't occur, then the death toll would be enormous, not only directly caused by Covid, but also because of the secondary knock on effect to all other serious medical conditions as there simply wouldn't be enough health care infrastructure to go round.