There’s no assurances that future variants will be as mild or less mild than Omicron, especially for the vaccinated. This article is difficult to read because of the medical terminology, so you may want to skip to the “Lessons to be Learned” section. From Geert Vanden Bossche at voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org:
Dedicated to all the courageous Canadian and American truckers and to the doctors who support them in their vitally important fight against vaccine mandates and immunologic discrimination.
Will Omicron induce herd immunity or will it enable SARS-CoV-2 to transition into variants capable of potentiating ADE in vaccinees?
Could Omicron metamorphose into a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Given the high and steadily increasing vaccine coverage rates in large parts of the world and the ongoing mass vaccination of children and continuation of booster campaigns, I am of the opinion that Omicron has the capacity to evolve into a much less benign variant, regardless of whether or not infection prevention measures are relaxed or lifted.
A coronavirus (CoV) can only replicate and mutate. The widely held belief that during the course of a pandemic viruses tend to become more infectious but less virulent is a myth—one kept alive by those who don’t understand the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic. The latter are fully dependent upon the outcome of the interplay between the virus and the host immune system at a population level. Abiding by this ‘rule’ is the sole qualifier necessary to be an expert of viral pandemics. For several months I’ve been warning that continued mass vaccination and high vaccine coverage rates would prevent SARS-CoV-2 (SC-2) from generating sufficient herd immunity to control, let alone end, the current pandemic (1, 2, 3). The advent of Omicron hasn’t changed my mind, on the contrary!
