> Another massive factor is we have no idea how fast the virus will mutate. Sorry, what? We've been sequencing and tracking variants and lineages reliably sin

> Another massive factor is we have no idea how fast the virus will mutate. Sorry, what? We've been sequencing and tracking variants and lineages reliably since the pandemic started. This is very well travelled science. We've seen multiple notable variants arrive already, something that was predicted form the very early days of the pandemic and that surprised no one in the field. Literally reality is the opposite of what you're saying. The virus is in fact "mutating" in more or less exactly the way that virologists would have expected, given decades of research on the subject. One of the weirdest angles that the anti-vax/anti-mask crowd tend to take is to somehow argue that covid-19 is simultaneously "just a disease"/"not that bad" and that it's somehow some crazy unpredictable thing that defies the expectations of all of science. And both are wrong! It's a very conventional novel disease behaving the way novel diseases do. There's a "global pandemic" among some species or another every few years (e.g. 90% of the pacific sea stars disappeared to a novel virus like 15 years ago and they're just now recovering). And that's bad, and requires action!