Are you clicking the wrong article, or just fucking with me? I'll cut and paste directly from the article:
The idea that infections tend to become less lethal over time was first proposed by notable bacteriologist Dr. Theobald Smith in the late 1800s. His theory about pathogen evolution was later dubbed the "law of declining virulence."
Simple and elegant, Smith's theory was that to ensure their own survival, pathogens evolve to stop killing their human hosts. Instead, they create only a mild infection, allowing people to walk around, spreading the virus further afield. Good for the virus, and, arguably, good for us.
But over the past 100 years, virologists have learned that virus evolution is more chaotic. Virus evolution is a game of chance, and less about grand design.
In some cases, viruses evolve to become more virulent.
Continued virus survival, spread and virulence are all about the evolutionary pressures of multiple factors, including the number of people available to infect, how long humans live after infection, the immune system response and time between infection and symptom onset. Unfortunately, that means it's nearly impossible to predict the future of the pandemic, because viruses don't always evolve in a predictable pattern.
SO yeah. Anyone asserting viruses always - or even often - evolve to become less virulent needs to produce evidence supporting this claim, and there is none. THey're just referencing pure speculation from a theory that's over 100 years old.
No one knows what a virus will evolve to do... it's pure chance.
Measles isn't maybe the best example, since it's always had a low mortality rate, and mortality is limited to kids under 5. And those vaccines were developed by science for the benefit of humanity, not by greedy MBAs at large pharmaceutical corporations, looking for a way to profit.
If we're looking at Spanish Flu as a historical example though, looks like their were 4 waves of it before it kinda petered out. We're on wave #4 right now!
The wikipedia article isn't very detailed about the end of the 1918 Pandemic:
By 1920, the virus that caused the pandemic became much less deadly and caused only ordinary seasonal flu.
Like... that's it, I guess? Just wait it out.
Also, probably like the Spanish Flu, once this ends, we'll have several years of neurological disorders and secondary infections caused by COVID-19 to hit to look forward too. But I'm sure we'll just wave those off and scoff at anyone who links the two together.
But even if you have the view that there's nothing we can do that will stop a viral pandemic, I think the smart, humane, decent, Christian approach is still to attempt to limit the spread, saving lives and minimizing the number of sick. Curbing the spread until a less virulent strain becomes prevalent and outcompetes the more lethal variants could add up to additional years of average lifespan for your country, save 100,000's or millions of lives, and set a good precedent for how you yourself will be treated when you're elderly and vulnerable to disease.
But the alternative approach seems to have won out, and will probably win out next time, for better or worse: who fucking cares? People die and get sick all the time. STFU and GBTW.
