Quote:
Originally Posted by Aquarian Sports Cards
That's an easy one to answer from a science perspective. The more people who are unvaccinated the more time we give the virus to mutate. The more time we give it to mutate the more likely it mutates into a variant against which the current vaccines don't work. THAT'S why herd immunity is such a big deal. Not as much for immediate health but to keep this thing from lingering and flaring up continuously for years.
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The argument you post is missing in important detail, especially in regards to herd immunity. Herd Immunity is not caused by vaccination alone, but natural immunity plus vaccination for those who do not have that natural immunity. It is incorrect presumption that a virus cannot mutate due to vaccination, it can mutate either way. In the classical sense, a vaccinated person often becomes a carrier.
Now the current vaccines used against covid in North America are not the classical type, and they are not designed to provide immunity. They are designed to provide a decreased percentage for the spike protein to bind to ACE2, thus lowering viral load in which the viral side effects are lower or not noticed by the person. Even in this design, they still say that a person who is vaccinated can still become infected and still spread the virus, albeit at a lower rate.
The pressure on the virus due to the operating environment is what causes a virus to mutate. The limiting factors are the inability to spread, be it from a vaccinated person's increased resilience to the spike protein, or a recovered person with immunity. In this case, a virus may mutate to overcome those limitations. Now there are various outcomes of our current environment, as we have 4 (or 5) groups of people:
1. Those who have not had an infection but are not immune
2. Those who have recovered from an infection and have immunological memory (the body recognises the virus as well as spike protein)
3. Those who are vaccinated but have not had a previous infection.
4. Those who have recovered, have the immunological memory, and are vaccinated.
5. Those who are naturally immune
(I think this is all of the possibilities at this time, if I forgot one let me know)
So from the above, we can potentially ignore #5 because there is no way to know how a mutant would effect them. For the others the situation can vary depending on the reason why the mutant came into being.
If a mutation occurs where a portion of the virus changes but it still binds to ACE2, then it will effect group 3 more than 2 or 4 because group 3 does not have immunological memory of the virus, only the spike protein
If a mutation occurs where the spike protein changes OR binds to something other than ACE2 but the virus itself largely remains unchanged, then it will effect group 3 more than group 2 and 4, because group 2 would have the memory of the virus.
The moral of the story is that vaccines do not (and have not) ever stopped a virus from mutating. Now there is some tedpidation in the literature I have read that vaccinating such large portions of a population gives the population too common of an infection vector. Rather than longer periods in the past of natural infection and a vaccine coming much later tends to give a varied type of immunity in a population, which creates a more difficult environment for a virus to adapt to.
This virus is new, and the methods that governments have been using to contain it are new. Whether you get the vaccine or not, we won't know how it plays out until it plays out. And even then, it isn't like we can know if we did it right, because we can't have a do-over to try something else.