"That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it."
The world changed between the beginning of vaccine availability and today. New variants emerged from unvaccinated populations and some of those variants (Delta being the most prominent currently being reported) are able to evade the immune response generated by the vaccine (breakthrough infections). The guidance was updated to reflected newly available information -- would you prefer that the CDC ignore new data and just stick with its initial statements?
The reason we are far from normalcy is that since the beginning of this pandemic people have been refusing to do what they need to do to slow the spread. If people had done what health officials asked, we might have been closer to normalcy. Take your complaints to all those right-wing extremists in the media and the government who politicized a public health crisis and who continue to tell people to ignore the CDC.
No. Variants spring up because of non sterilizing vaccines. We always knew to NEVER engage in mass vaccination during a pandemic situation. We also knew we can’t vaccinated against corona viruses. As evidenced by Israel and other countries.
> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]
This doesn't even make sense as biology. You're essentially saying the virus evolved exclusively because of the pressure vaccines, which is absurd on its face.
> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]
The covid vaccine is just that - limits symptoms but still allows transmission.
> In an unvaccinated population, mutations occur at random producing a wide genetic spread with very few progeny resulting in long lasting lineages (Muller's ratchet), with a selection pressure that favors those variants that can (a) win the competition of replication among its cousins within a host, and (b) not kill the host so that it can thrive in new hosts.
> In a highly vaccinated population, mutations occur at random, but the genetic spread among versions of the virus is narrowed to those that can evade immunity, which has now been made more uniform among the vaccinated population. This further encourages such lineages even when they would not have won out within individual hosts in competition among its cousins. Such evasion increases chances of reinfection. [2]
The world changed between the beginning of vaccine availability and today. New variants emerged from unvaccinated populations and some of those variants (Delta being the most prominent currently being reported) are able to evade the immune response generated by the vaccine (breakthrough infections). The guidance was updated to reflected newly available information -- would you prefer that the CDC ignore new data and just stick with its initial statements?
The reason we are far from normalcy is that since the beginning of this pandemic people have been refusing to do what they need to do to slow the spread. If people had done what health officials asked, we might have been closer to normalcy. Take your complaints to all those right-wing extremists in the media and the government who politicized a public health crisis and who continue to tell people to ignore the CDC.