Comment by sabujp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sabujp | Hacker News Reader

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There's no bad propaganda when it comes to persuading people to get vaccinated. The alternative is the mess we're in now because people hesitate to get vaccinated. This study uses HIV to model sars mutation. HIV is highly mutagenic :

    https://www.google.com/search?q=hiv+mutation+rate&oq=hiv+mutation+rate&aqs=chrome.0.0i512l6j0i22i30l4.1834j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

sar-cov2 is less mutagenic than the flu and far less than HIV:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539923/

i.e. based on the PLOS study and the one above:

    1. PLOS study constantly uses the word "risk" and "may", i.e. the authors don't know the actual probabilities of escape and use a mathematical model based on a far more mutagenic virus, HIV.
    2. even if there's a low threshold for the virus to mutate, most of the mutations are not viable
    3. so far we've seen only 4 dominant strains, the rest are being outcompeted : https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+dominant+mutations+of+covid+are+there
    4. It makes more logical sense to me that if your unvaccinated body takes 10 days to mount a peak immune response (as mentioned in the PLOS study), that still gives the virus more time to mutate even if there are no pressures to mutate. There's lots of missing data in your study, particularly what exactly is the mutation rate for sars-cov-2 in vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations? But if we simply look at where the dominant mutations have come from so far, it's not from countries with high vaccination rates like Israel, New Zealand, or from asian countries that take serious measures at curbing the spread of the virus, singapore, japan, korea, china.

> There's no bad propaganda when it comes to persuading people to get vaccinated

This is a very dangerous road to go down. I strongly disagree that the government and media should have license to lie to people if it's a useful lie in the moment. All that does is erode trust in those institutions, the longer term results of which are the root cause of most of the anti-vaccine sentiment today.

> PLOS study constantly uses the word "risk" and "may", i.e. the authors don't know the actual probabilities of escape and use a mathematical model based on a far more mutagenic virus, HIV.

You're absolutely right. The experts are just guessing the odds of this stuff, and you and I are really only able to do the same, with even less certainty.

> It makes more logical sense to me that if your unvaccinated body takes 10 days to mount a peak immune response (as mentioned in the PLOS study), that still gives the virus more time to mutate even if there are no pressures to mutate

With all due respect, when dealing with probabilities like this, non-experts estimating what makes "logical sense" is completely useless.

> if we simply look at where the dominant mutations have come from so far, it's not from countries with high vaccination rates like Israel, New Zealand, or from asian countries that take serious measures at curbing the spread of the virus, singapore, japan, korea, china.

Israel and New Zealand have negligible populations on a world scale. The efficacy of social distancing in the east Asian countries you mentioned is clear, but completely unrelated to the question at hand. The delta variant came from India, a country of 1.4B people, before any of them had access to the vaccines. That tells us nothing about whether the vaccines net encourage or net discourage harmful virus evolution.

It's okay to say we don't know, and in fact far better to do so than to make up a politically convenient answer.

All those countries are small aside from China whose vaccine is not very effective and people with high East Asian ancestry have natural mutations against COVID. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3

You say vaccination or serious measure, which is the truth? Could a mutation not occur elsewhere and infect a densely populated area? There isn’t evidence that the places most affected were the origins of the virus mutations.

That article shows a clear correlation between 2 locations with large populations that are susceptible to high risk of severe covid and 2 of the main mutations delta (india) and alpha (uk).

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