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Well you've summed it up yourself in two very prescient sentences. 1.the vaccine is effective at stopping known variants in the UK and 2. Viruses will always mutate. Put them together. The vaccine is putting severe selection pressures on our UK variants. That's what drives evolution. Viruses...

Selfish gene theory. The virus' genes just 'want' to reproduce. They don't 'care' about anything else. If the vaccine stops the virus reproducing then *any* mutation that allows it to reproduce will succeed. Survival of the fittest. If that same mutation causes incredibly high host mortality...

I wrote this earlier but you may have missed it. If we want to minimise risk of the vaccine not being effective we really really need to get control of the virus whilst we are rolling it out. If there are mutations that can allow the virus to get round the vaccine (and it seems there are...

It is a valid point. But although we can't control what other countries do, we can set an example and take the lead. We are ahead of most of the world in vaccine roll out after all. Just because an anti - vaccine variant might arise somewhere else in the world doesn't mean we should shrug our...

You're right there is no inevitability of a vaccine - busting variant and you're absolutely correct that the less virus there is, the easier it will be to contain new outbreaks of new variants. But what there is right now is heightened risk of successful new variants arising, and that will...

Yes, successful mutations will become more common when the original virus is doing badly, that's the basis of natural selection. But that's not about raw numbers, its about selection pressures. So the original virus did badly under the lockdown measures and a more transmissible variant arose...

The more the virus circulates during the vaccination period, the more chance there is that mutations arise that can beat the vaccine. This is a really really critical time, because the virus will be meeting more and more vaccinated people as we roll the program out, and thus any mutations that...