But you're playing a silly halfway game with this 'personal choice' business on vaccines. There are people out there who say it's their 'personal choice' whether to wear a mask. I'm pretty sure you would agree with me that those people are exploiting their freedom and needlessly putting others at risk.

People don't have the personal choice to drive drunk, even if they think they're fine. They shouldn't have the freedom to needlessly put others at risk in other ways either.

From everything I've heard, the mutation rate of sars-cov-2 is still very slow compared to other common respiratory viruses. But yes, it is still mutating. It's doing so because it's reproducing in so many people.

Those mutations are not just a US problem. They're caused by low vaccination rates worldwide, and worldwide vaccination rates will probably be low for years. I think that's part of your argument, and I agree with it.

However, the US is still lagging the rest of the industrialized world. So we're not doing our part in the global effort. Also, the US is still relatively isolated from the rest of the world and will remain so until international tourism recovers. So we can reach and maintain herd immunity in the US independent of how the infection rates are going elsewhere.

Yes, new mutations will come. And eventually we'll need boosters to handle them. Thank god for mRNA vaccination technology, which will allow us to fine tune a booster for every major variant we see. Just as long as people grow up and take their fucking shots.

It's not out of the question that we could permanently eradicate this disease. But even if we don't, the number of people who get vaccinated will directly determine the number of people who die.