Maybe you're in the wrong thread, then?
> for me, the question is: how can we prevent the virus from mutating enough to escape vaccine
Probably not with a vaccine that is not quite strong enough to prevent spread, but simultaneously strong enough to put selection pressure on the virus.
> the answer is to stop the virus from infecting a host in which it can mutate freely and from which it can escape. we don't know these people, so we should aim to vaccinate as many as possible before it finds another person who walks around with the virus for multiple months with no symptoms, accelerating natural selection thousandfold.
The scenario you are describing is the immunocompromised person whose body can't quite kill the virus, but also puts selection pressure on it. Such cases have been described, but whatever mutation would come out of that is not necessarily going to be much more effective at overcoming the defenses of a normal immune system.
The Sars-CoV2 virus will almost certainly stick around and it will keep mutating, even with the best of vaccination efforts. Nature finds a way. We'll have to get used to it.
