[michaelmrose]

Killing hosts isn't beneficial to the virus survival, quite the opposite in fact. An infection that super aggressively reproduces but due to antibodies fails to gain a foothold beyond the nasopharynx in vaccinated people doing little damage to the host but spreading effectively to both vaccinated individuals who largely have the above experience and unvaccinated who get miserably sick and sometimes drown in their own mucus could be very fit in evolutionary terms in a mostly vaccinated population.

A mutation which increased its spread slightly among vaccinated individuals by 10% while increasing the mortality of the unvaccinated by 10x would be fitter yet. This isn't fate because the space the virus explores is driven by its actual difficult to predict particulars not hypothetical thought experiments but I wouldn't bet on covid going away, I wouldn't bet on people choosing to be more likely to die and abandoning vaccination, and I wouldn't bet on covid becoming safer for the unvaccinated in the short term.

The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse. So if you choose to stay among the unvaccinated I would expect your prospects in the next several years range from bad to worse. Make your own decisions accordingly.

[ggdG]

> Killing hosts isn't beneficial to the virus survival, quite the opposite in fact. An infection that super aggressively reproduces but due to antibodies fails to gain a foothold beyond the nasopharynx in vaccinated people doing little damage to the host but spreading effectively to both vaccinated individuals who largely have the above experience and unvaccinated who get miserably sick and sometimes drown in their own mucus could be very fit in evolutionary terms in a mostly vaccinated population.

Yes. This is what that Quanta article was all about. Here's the link once more: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...

> The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse.

Agreed. There's a tragedy of the commons there.

[michaelmrose]

If we make it possible for everyone to be vaccinated if they so choose the only tragedy will be the innocent old and immunocompromised who die despite vaccination because they were effectively murdered by someone else's stupidity.