🚨*Covid-19 may be responsible for more than 18 million deaths worldwide*🚨
While infectious diseases like this have devastated humanity, it may be wrong to assume they are always antithetical to our survival & flourishing as a species.
Otherwise, why would ancient pathogens such as malaria, cholera, typhoid, measles & flu persist as human-only diseases & why have we not evolved immunity to them?
Was Boris Johnson right about living with COVID?
It's hard to imagine that the survival of the species was uppermost in peoples minds when successive wave of the Plague hit Europe in medieval times and as recently as the 1600s. Likewise with the terrifying outbreak of deadly influenza that ravaged the world around 1918. Why haven't we evolved immunity to them - well viruses and bacteria have this inconvenient habit of mutating so as to avoid our body's carefully laid immune system traps!
It then begs the question how we managed to eradicate smallpox?
By vaccinating it out of existence. There is/was a highly effective vaccine against smallpox whose effectiveness was not greatly impacted by the pathogen mutating.
Influenza, on the other hand is very adept at mutating and therefore a new vaccine is required every single year. Even then, the vaccines for influenza are of extremely variable efficacy.
