As the article makes clear the variants do not all follow a linear development, they do not stem from the preceding variant necessarily, therefore we should not be assuming that all future variants will be less severe. One of the ways to lessen the possibility of variants is to limit infection.
Do you see any indication within our current government's thinking that they are in the least bit interested in limiting infection?
Do you see the majority of the public doing anything to limit infection?
We are getting the response badly wrong here.
I think the intention of the government and public was to limit infection by means of mass vaccination, but unfortunately that seems to be backfiring - see below.
Immune escape is happening largely because we are allowing the infection rate to soar and doing fuck all about it.
(Disclaimer: as far as I am concerned, the following is theory, but makes sense enough that I decided not to be vaccinated).
Immune escape is happening because the majority of people have vaccine-elicited antibodies that cannot themselves prevent infection any longer, since they are designed to stick to the spike protein, which has a high mutation rate; they are nonetheless still produced by B cells when a vaccinated person is exposed to a new variant, they stick to the virus more readily than the innate antibodies, the first line of defense, thus out-competing the latter and rendering that person more prone to infection.
Had we vaccinated only the vulnerable groups, there would not have been such high surges of anti-spike antibodies in the population that only viruses with mutated spike protein could survive.
Healthy people who got sick and recovered would have developed antibodies not just to the spike protein but to other proteins in the virus that do not mutate (ie they are 'conserved'). This would have reduced the transmission of more highly infectious variants, so that they took much longer to become dominant, which would result in slowing of the infection rate and the virus becoming endemic.
