Are There Risks of “Leaky” Covid Vaccines and Is Anyone Considering Them?

This article is more of a plea for debate among the epidemiology and virology community to answer me (or calm my parental worries).

I think vaccines are absolutely crucial not only to ending the COVID pandemic but also to prevent further widespread infection, hence mutations leading to potentially more virulent variants.

Specifically, I fear a variant that will be. more deadly to young healthy people.

As I “game out” the progression of COVID, I worry:

1- Is it not inevitable that many many more people are infected?

2- Why? Because we cannot seem to vaccinate enough of the world fast enough. Aside from vaccine resistance, you have vast populations in many countries without access to vaccines and this seems unlikely to rapidly change.

3- Does it not follow then that we will have many COVID mutations?

4- Does it not follow that many mutations will eventually lead to a more virulent variant?

Given the above four points, is there a danger to vaccines that are not broadly effective against new variants?

There has been much discussion of the fact that vaccines may reduce the severity of COVID variants, even if they do not completely prevent infection (see this linked February, 2021 article from Harvard Medical School: COVID-19 2.0 | Harvard Medical School ).

The data is not conclusive on whether it prevents the spread of new variants, which I would think is not unusual (given the data is probably changing fairly quickly).

Andrew Read, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, characterized “imperfect” or “leaky” vaccines in a 2001 Nature paper, referenced in the below linked 2015 Science article:

Could some vaccines make diseases more deadly? | Science | AAAS

(I should note that, from what I’ve read recently, Andrew Read is firmly supportive of COVID vaccination efforts, as am I.)

If a vaccine reduces the severity of more virulent variants but does not prevent infection or spread, does it run the risk of making a more deadly variant worse by enabling it to spread to ever larger populations?

Specifically, if there was a region in a country where 50% of the population is vaccinated and 50% are not. Let us assume a more deadly variant of COVID comes about. It spreads rapidly through the region. The 50% of unvaccinated people tragically die. But the 50% vaccinated people do not die. They are infected by the more deadly variant. They experience less severe symptoms but they transmit the virus to more victims than they would have had they quickly died (like the unvaccinated in the region).

Does the more deadly variant not then become a more dangerous pandemic than the original COVID pandemic?

I am not suggesting this is likely or even a danger. I would like reassurance that these outcomes are impossible (or I’d settle for highly unlikely) and that they are being considered by the scientific community.