Spent a few days reading about viruses and I have questions. Maybe some of the sciencey folk here can help.
This thing already has new strains. ( Preliminary genomic characterisation of an emergent SARS-CoV-2 lineage in the UK defined by a novel set of spike mutations - nCoV-2019 Genomic Epidemiology - Virological ) Now this begs a couple questions imo. 1) What good is the vaccine gonna do against new strains if the thing isn't actually dead virus but rather a vaccine that "teaches" your cells to ID the spike proteins? If the spike are different on the new strain doesn't this just put us back to square one in terms of a needing another vaccine? And 2) given that quite a lot of the coronaviruses already out there, many of them not super deadly (at least not enough to warrant the lockdowns and bs we've seen this time) have we not fucked up by locking down and preventing the evolution of this strain becoming less virulent? Viruses don't care about killing hosts, they need replication. Had we not locked down might we have something no more deadly than the average cold by now?