Whimsical

I was thinking about vaccines and their usefulness, when it occurred to me that, in using vaccines, we've sort of pigeonholed viruses into behaving the way covid does. Haven't we?

If a virus is slow-mutating or distinct enough, then it goes the way of polio or smallpox - that is, nearly or completely eradicated from the world, especially in countries wealthy enough to vaccinate en masse.

So the only kind of viruses that are capable of thriving for very long are those that spread fast, and therefore mutate fast enough that vaccines can "miss" like they do sometimes with the flu. And if a virus maintains lethality above some socially-determined threshold, people take it seriously enough to isolate and kill it off. So it kinda feels like humanity "made" covid, not in a lab, but sort of by default, by killing all the other behaviors of treatable/preventable plagues that could have existed.

Are we setting ourselves up for more fast-moving covid-like viruses in the future, by vaccinating the way that we do?

I guess for this to be any evidence toward changing our practices, it would have to be the case that there's a viral "ecosystem" in which vaccinating against one virus makes more room for others, and I don't know if that's true.

Are covid-like viruses simply an inevitability, or could a change in practice have reduced the likelihood of such a thing happening?