6 ms·
Absolutely not, or at least not yet, because: 1) the most contagious variants have emerged from countries with little to no vaccination: UK before vaccination
by woko 5y ago
Absolutely not, or at least not yet, because:
1) the most contagious variants have emerged from countries with little to no vaccination: UK before vaccination and with very little protective measures (pubs, etc.), Brazil with Bolsonaro, India with a very high population density who are mostly unvaccinated, etc. These variants appear thanks to the high number of contaminations. Vaccination means fewer contaminations, and thus the less likely arising of mutations and a new variant.
2) Current vaccines are very effective against the current variants. This observation is inconsistent with the assumption that one of the variants could have been naturally selected to resist to vaccination. This is also expected as the percentage of vaccinated people is low in most parts of the world, thus there is little pressure to select a vaccine-resistant variant for now.
If we had made the variants "worse" because of imperfect vaccination, we would have seen a vaccine-resistant variant emerge from one of the vaccinated (>50%) countries.
- makomk 5y agoIt's looking extremely iffy right now as to whether it's even possible to achieve herd immunity against the current variants through vaccination, which will set up basically the perfect environment to select for vaccine escape globally: enough people vaccinated that it's a strong advantage, but the virus can still spread and infect more people in order to get a chance to adapt.
- native_samples 5y agoBy "very little protective measures (pubs etc)" you mean the pubs were all closed? The UK has had some of the most restrictive lockdowns in the western world. I agree that the idea that vaccines are leading to new variants seems extremely dubious though. Like everything else in epidemiology, when you go looking for the underlying rational basis for it, there's just nothing robust there.