There's a book called why the West still rules and in it it talks about the history of human civilization and discusses the idea that there are sort of theories that can predict the major directions and major players at each stage of history as the meaning of technology and geography alters over time in response to the level of development and interconnectedness of society.

In that book there's this concept called the advantages of backwardness and it's this thing that crops up often after a crisis where the previous major player, having collapsed as a result of whatever forces brought them down, surrender some of their former glory to previously more backward regions whose backwards methods, in the new climate or situation, set them up for success.

Here's a quote from Ian Morris the book's author discussing the advantages of backwardness in an interview:

"And as cities, states, and industry spread, they entered new geographical niches where the old ways of doing things didn’t always work. People on these frontiers were forced to tinker, to make old techniques work in new—and eventually better—ways.

The best example might be in the origins of agriculture: Seven-thousand years ago, farming first developed in the hilly lands around the edges of what we now call Iraq. When farmers moved down to the plains of modern Iraq, they found that to make farming work, they had to develop irrigation agriculture.

We saw the same thing happen again with the spread of industry in the 19th century. Industry was invented in the British Isles, but as it spread outward into Germany and North America, people in these places had to create new ways of making industry work successfully. As they did so, Germany and the United States began to replace the British Isles as the center of industry. And we see the same process continuing to work in our own day. In the last 20 years, we’ve seen the meteoric rise of China. We should expect the “advantages of backwardness” to continue being one of the major motors in world history."

The connection with the present topic I think is the following. In a sense we've denied our immune systems the advantages of backwardness by the very same advanced technology we designed to augment and protect them. In other words by rushing to create and deploy a vaccine we've prevented our collective human immune system from cultivating defenses to this virus. In that sense I think the policy from a high-level strategic point of view is a weakness and possibly fundamentally flawed, because it opens the possibility the we've made our immune system dependent on vaccinations to deal with further and related infections in future. The other side of the coin is the advantages of backwardness for the virus: we have applied such a strong selective pressure so universally and quickly that in order for the virus to survive it is forced to evolve to become more transmissible, and possibly more dangerous. The more dangerous point is contentious but I argue it as follows because the more dangerous a variant is is correlated with the strength of our measures against it we are selecting for more dangerous variance to evolve more transmissibility. In effect this could be one of the first times in human history that our advanced technology has seriously thrown a natural system previously in equilibrium, in other words the equilibrium between our collective immune system and the collective microbiome of bacterial viruses on Earth, out of balance. nearly many natural examples of how we've done this but they're localized to particular regions like oil spills or Forest clearing we're throwing ecosystems out of balance left right and center but this might be the first time we've done it on a global scale. (And if we release the prophesized mosquito nuclear bomb that's going to wipe out mosquitoes around the world that will be another example of throwing a global ecosystem out of balance). In this pandemic topic, as we keep throwing more fuel at that fire thinking we're solving the problem we may end up simply be providing fuel for future conflagrations that could lead to our collective demise.

I don't want to be too dramatic here and I admit the choice of words has a little bit of that effect but we are talking about a massive global scale thing which we are right to take it seriously and while there may be many motivations for getting a large proportion of the world vaccinated, this line of thinking is not one I've seen elaborated very much so I wanted to add it here.