I was thinking about vaccines and their usefulness, when it occurred to me that, in using vaccines, we’ve sort of pigeonholed viruses into behaving the way covid does. Haven’t we?
If a virus is slow-mutating or distinct enough, then it goes the way of polio or smallpox - that is, nearly or completely eradicated from the world, especially in countries wealthy enough to vaccinate en masse.
So the only kind of viruses that are capable of thriving for very long are those that spread fast, and therefore mutate fast enough that vaccines can “miss” like they do sometimes with the flu. And if a virus maintains lethality above some socially-determined threshold, people take it seriously enough to isolate and kill it off. So it kinda feels like humanity “made” covid, not in a lab, but sort of by default, by killing all the other behaviors of treatable/preventable plagues that could have existed.
Are we setting ourselves up for more fast-moving covid-like viruses in the future, by vaccinating the way that we do?
I guess for this to be any evidence toward changing our practices, it would have to be the case that there’s a viral “ecosystem” in which vaccinating against one virus makes more room for others, and I don’t know if that’s true.
Are covid-like viruses simply an inevitability, or could a change in practice have reduced the likelihood of such a thing happening?
So I’m not a virologist by any stretch, but I do work with computer systems as a profession and think there’s a comparison to be made.
In replicating any given bit of data there’s always the potential for errors. With computer systems there a checks in place but for living systems no so much. The more complex the data amd the more times it replicates the greater the raw chamce to have a particluar bit in the code get scrambled.
So if you have a fadt breeding bug that’s a longer string of RNA than some other the chamce for variants is greater. For viruses, lethality is a byproduct rather than a feature, but since the virus itself has no cognition or control over the outcomes of these fliped bitsthere is an entirely random chance that any given error in the code will either be beneficial, neutral, or deteimental to the propagation of the virus.
To get to what I think is the original question here of ‘did humans create this condition’ I would suspect the answer is no then. For comparison, we still have the ‘common cold’ which changes with the year but there’s never been a vaccine of any meaningful sort issued for it. This particular parent corona virus started off with an abnormally high mortality rate compared to other similar class viruses but seems to have shifted in the last several itterations to a less dangerous (at least in the immidiate semse, long term maybe not) but more rapidly and readily spread form.