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I am upset with the CDC too but even if we were perfect from Jan 2020 through Aug 2020 (or whatever) we'd still be getting hit with delta now. The US just orde

I am upset with the CDC too but even if we were perfect from Jan 2020 through Aug 2020 (or whatever) we'd still be getting hit with delta now. The US just ordered 200M booster shots. Making these is pretty much cutting into the capacity of other countries to get their first shots. I am for this - they are American companies and the US should happily pay for them for its citizens. But when there 7.5B other people in the world its not really up to us when the next variant hits.

epistasis 5y ago
The primary fuel for evolution of new variants is the spread of infection. Every time the virus copies itself is a chance for a new mutation, another roll of the roulette wheel for the creation of a stronger sARS-CoV-2. So by letting infections spread as far as they did, we gave the raw evolutionary fuel to create new, more contagious, variants. If we had cut the number of global infections in half, we might be living in a timeline where a delta-like variant never evolved. We developed vaccines in record time, but if we had a way to distribute them more quickly, maybe it would have been prevented. It's a global fight, and every government that let it get out of control worsened our chances at containment.