How Predictable Is The Development Of Immunity To A Disease?

Diseases in nature tend to naturally become less virulent over time, in part, because the disease vector changes and in part because the host population develops immunity to it.

How possible is it, in theory, to accurately predict the time period until immunity to the disease or its decreased virulence causes it to be an unimportant threat to almost all human populations and how accurate could those prediction be, in theory?

Is there an effective minimum or maximum period of time over which this happens in a modern-like population?

For example, suppose that someone was designing a bioweapon in the context of a world like Earth in the near future. Could they design a disease to become obsolete after a fairly precisely measured period of time that was less than a human lifetime but more than a few months?

posted over 6 years ago

ohwilleke‭

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