It gets worse: some people now not getting their second shots

[PeterB]

Ted King wrote:
[quote=PeterB]

If, as the Pfizer/Moderna data suggested, one shot gave 85% protection, that's still a lot of people who will have gotten vaccinated but will still end up getting sick. When those people get sick, the question is whether the virus' mutations will be selected for, in terms of host immune system evasion. Then we end up with a virus for which the vaccines might be far less effective or totally ineffective.

Would that be artificial or natural selection? tartrek2:
Technically, it's both ... by our actions as human beings, we're apparently performing an experiment on a grand scale, along the lines of lab-based evolution. Selecting for things that manage to survive, despite our varied interventions. But of course lab-based evolution requires natural selection too... a virus which is super-contagious but also super-lethal would essentially select itself out, because if you too quickly kill the host, that limits your ability to replicate and spread.

Edit: oh, and it's also been proposed that some of the variants we've already been seeing have resulted at least partially as a function of human behavior: the fact of social distancing, hand-washing/hygiene, etc. ... we might have been then selecting for things which are more contagious.