One thing left out of the article is whether we should be vaccinating people to discourage spread simply to keep the risk of a much worse variant from randomly occurring low.
Vaccinations with current vaccines don't stop infections/spread at all - it's very obvious now with the Delta variant in countries that are already massively vaccinated like Israel and Island.
In fact, vaccinated people can apparently carry just as high of a viral load as unvaccinated people (while vaccinated people will likely experience less symptoms). So the virus will happily keep infecting as many people as it can regardless of the vaccines.
Having parts of the spike protein targeted helps with existing variants, but not with new variants that might escape those markers. Delta is weakening the effects of vaccines already. Sure, booster shots might include new markers, but it's still a narrow moving target.
However, natural infection will provide broader immune response and antibodies. So if one could be sure to remain in good health, infection is much less terrible after two vaccine shots. That might provide additional protection that vaccines may not. It's more random though, but researchers are not foreign to the idea.
Nobody is able to predict future outcomes of it, but at some point society will need to accept widely spread of infections and deal with those outcomes. Hopefully, vaccine shots is enough to deal with the initial shock so the body can do the rest. It's not just about avoiding killing old people, but also avoiding degrading public health too much.
It’s a long story, but part of the reason is that bacteria evolve resistance in the presence of the antibiotic, while here, the virus would need to randomly evolve it in the unvaccinated, then sustain useless adaption for a while until it gets the opportunity to infect a vaccinated person.
With Covid, many of the vaccines target a highly functional portion of the virus for the induced immunity. This means that mutations that make the vaccine induced antibodies less effective are at least somewhat likely to alter the function of the virus.
My understanding is that we aren't really able to analytically determine the possibility space.
That's only true if the vaccine stops almost all infections, which the COVID vaccines do not.
There's another comment in this thread from someone who's been vaccinated and sick for 9 days. That's a great environment for the virus to evolve immunity to the vaccine. And it's not an uncommon situation.
Again, like the person above you said, it's not that simple. Bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics because they can either avoid or start to digest the chemical that would normally be harmful to them. Here it's not the vaccine that's killing the virus - it's your own immune system, and every single one is different. So yeah, maybe in this person's body the immune system didn't learn to recognize the virus and kill it - it means literally nothing for how another person's immune system will behave when they encounter it.
Vaccinations teach everyone's immune system to target the same part of the virus. Since everyone has immunity to the same spike protein, a change in that protein means something to all vaccinated people.
Big pharma also has an interest in promoting booster shots. It would be a steady flow of revenue. If it causes selective pressures that create new variants, that just means a perpetual market for booster shots.
Except that it literally doesn't, there is no data to suggest that it would, and I have no idea why this particular idea is repeated so much. Like I said in the comment above, none of the vaccines that we use have ever caused super variants to emerge. Zero. We don't have a super variant of Polio, or any other diseases that people get vaccinated against.
So either you sacrifice 1-2% of the population and let variants continue while not vaccinating anyone. Or you get vaccinated and reduce your risks of going to the hospital by a ratio of 30:1.
Even the flu vaccine doesn't cause new variants, and that has a spotty coverage at best.
Like, what you said sounds scienc-y enough that a lot of people seem to believe it, but it's literally not true and has never been true.
Though there is still concern due to the focus of these vaccines on the spike protein
It’s widely regarded to be true for Marek’s disease.
Look up “leaky vaccines”
I suspect we have the deadlier variants not despite, but because we are vaccinating and the vaccination is not effective in preventing spread.
But we have seen that Delta reinfects previously infected patients, ergo, an infection is at a best a leaky vaccine (ie as good as current vaccines, though there are indications that it is not [1]), and at worse, a catalyst to worse outcomes considering the danger done during previous infection, b) a vaccine is not offered to the previously infected, c) the effects of long term covid.
[1] https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...
[1] https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...