[ianch99]

Here's another useless paper in the Lancet talking about the risk of vaccine escape:

SARS-CoV-2 incidence and vaccine escape

Despite its simplicity, our quantitative illustration demonstrates that strategies for mitigating the vaccine escape risk should be explored. Reducing case numbers locally should be only one element of these strategies. Travel restrictions to reduce the risk of importing novel variants should be considered. We recognise that assessing the escape variant emergence risk not only requires the variant to arise via mutation as considered here, but also to grow to appreciable frequencies. This is a stochastic process, depending on the availability of hosts to infect and the escape variant's fitness. A reduction in cases leads to both a reduction in the risk of escape variants appearing and a reduction in their subsequent establishment via transmission in the population. Acquisition of additional mutations that are beneficial for the virus is also more likely to be suppressed if incidence is reduced.

In summary, high SARS-CoV-2 incidence rates act to increase the vaccine escape risk. Maintaining low case numbers using NPIs and vaccines is crucial at this time.

All authors report being members of the Joint Universities Pandemic and Epidemiological Research consortium (JUNIPER) and participants of the UK Government's Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational subgroup (SPI-M)