LogFAQs > #957013262

NFUN posted...

well, that segment is fine, anthroporphism aside. Vaccines add selective pressure towards developing a strain that resists the vaccine, similar (but I suppose not identical) to how antibiotic resistant bacteria emerge. That doesn't at all imply that the new strains would be more deadly or contagious, which is where the argument entirely fails. And of course that consequence is only relevant to people who actually take the vaccine, it's unlikely that the virus would mutate enough core features to largely evade the vaccine in the near future, it wouldn't be difficult to develop a new vaccine for strains with new features, and decreasing infected biomass (by the population taking vaccines, for example) decreases the opportunities it has to mutate at all, for the benefit of everyone

This is all true, the one thing I'd stress is that selective pressure doesn't create mutations, it can only act on what is already there. This is important because the Delta mutation existing in the first place is largely independent from the vaccination level of the population. Even if Delta mutated in a vaccinated host that's still a totally random event not much different from it mutating in someone who has natural antibodies. Delta's adaptations aren't hyper targeted against the vaccine or anything, it just happened to be more infectious and have a higher viral load and be resistant to antibodies, which turns out to be good against the vaccine.

I'm being pretty pedantic but we're talking basic evolutionary cause and effect here so. If I can offer a reductive hypothetical, the big takeaway is that we very likely would have had to deal with the Delta variant regardless of vaccination. Vaccination levels absolutely allowed it to spread more easily than the original COVID-19 strain so it's not a lock, but people have to understand this stuff (fitness) is all relative.

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