What you’re saying boils down to, we should assume that something will happen, and therefore act to deploy our limited resources to defend against this thing, j

What you’re saying boils down to, we should assume that something will happen, and therefore act to deploy our limited resources to defend against this thing, just because it isn’t theoretically impossible. Such an approach is guaranteed to massively fail and in doing so cost a lost of money and lives. It’s bad public policy because it is financially ruinous and leads to a greater number of deaths. Here’s the logic: We know that resources (time, focus, money) can be wasted if they are spent on things that are not effective. We also know that resources are finite. There is only so much time, so much money, and so many different things that you can try to accomplish at once. Therefore, limited resources must be deployed efficiently — towards the most effective interventions — if we want them collectively to achieve the greatest effect. This means dangers that are scientifically exceedingly unlikely to occur should perhaps not be entirely ignored but should not be driving major policy decisions. The issue here is not an absence of evidence. There is an abundance of evidence that coronavirus mutations are fundamentally different from influenza mutations.