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That's conjecture. A conclusion from this study[1] is that vaccines correlate with dominance of fitter variants. That suggests that it's possible that vaccines allow them to propagate.

"the decline in lineage diversity was indeed correlated with increased rates of mass vaccination. Furthermore, the decline in lineage diversity was coupled with increased dominance of the B.1.1.7 (alpha), B.1.1.617 (delta) and P.1 (gamma) variants of concern, suggesting that these variants may be “fitter” SARS-CoV-2 lineages.”

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v...

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> That's conjecture. A conclusion from this study

I suppose the big downside of the flood of preprints on COVID19 is that any particular position can be supported, however briefly, with some study before peer review [hopefully] cleans things up.

It sounds like you're arguing that vaccination helps fuel variants because without vaccination there wouldn't be any hinderance to the original virus rampaging through the population and thus no selection pressure. Though as people developed natural immunity, I don't see how we wouldn't end up in the same place, just with more dead people.

I don't think we can conclude natural immunity and vaccine immunity would result in the same outcomes. Vaccines wouldn't exist if we thought that being vaccinated and not being vaccinated resulted in the same thing. If those differences exist, it's not outlandish to think there may be differences in evolved virulence and severity too. That's certainly conjecture too though.

It is because these vaccines are very weak or leaky vaccines. They don't stop spread. This enhances the selective pressure.

A related short discussion on the matter

https://odysee.com/@DarkHorsePodcastClips:b/Natural-Vs-Vacci...

Good point - just wanted to mention: see my comments elsewhere in the thread for more peer-reviewed papers that further support the idea you mentioned.

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