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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

There are limits to how fast a virus can spread from person to person, and how quickly it can spread through a population. An intentional policy of inoculation is faster. That’s why vaccination works to reduce the incidence of even very contagious diseases like measles. Human logistics can pretty easily outrun the disease.

It’s also easier to control dosage with inoculation, and therefore control for side effects. A naturally reproducing virus, even one that begins benign, can infect different people with varying severity, and change via mutation over time.

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It took over a year and a half to come close to vaccinating everyone. Omicron infected the world in something like 2 months. Your statement that "An intentional policy of inoculation is faster" is clearly wrong.

Not saying this is a good idea though.

In the U.S. there have been about 75 million cases reported (this includes Omicron), while about 211 million people have received a full dose of vaccine.

This has nothing to do with your statement on how fast we are able to deploy a vaccine vs infect population with a virus.

Obviously, vaccine is preferable IF people were getting vaccinated.

Also, it is normal for viruses to infect vaccinated people. The point of most vaccines is not to protect any single person, it is to protect the population. This happens by making it difficult for the virus to find a new host.

When enough people are not vaccinated the virus is perfectly "happy" to mostly spread through unvaccinated population and hit the vaccinated population in the process.

Think about this way: imagine a town densely built with wooden houses.

Any fire would quickly consume entire town.

Now imagine replacing 25% of wooden houses with brick houses.

The fire will still consume entire town and it will still consume most or all of the brick houses.

Does this mean that brick houses spread fire as readily as wooden ones?

This is not necessarily the case, it depends on how contagious the disease is.

The UK managed to vaccinate approximately 700-900K people per day during the recent drive.

During the same time period we had approximately 200,000 confirmed cases (via test) per day. The general consensus is that the real number of infections approached 1 million.

It's not impossible to imagine that if the R rate were a bit higher the virus could spread faster.

You do have the issue that it won't reach people locked indoors, but then again vaccination doesn't reach all people either.

Also, if some people elect to be locked indoors they are also probably safe from the original deadly virus.

I mean the crafted virus would have to be significantly more transmissible than the deadly one it tries to outpace.

That's why I mentioned populations sabotaging the system.

I know this might sound like a radical idea, but vaccinations can only be effective when people are actually getting vaccinated.

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