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Comment by GaryTang | Hacker News Reader

If vaccination doesn’t stop transmission, could you say it provides a breeding ground for more resillient/contagious strains of the virus?

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What does you mean by resilient? That's not really a specific term in virology.

The current thinking is that new variants are most likely to evolve in immunocompromised patients who suffer from persistent infections.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...

No, the vaccine does not 'provide a breeding ground' for the virus. Quite the opposite, the vaccine reduces the potential pool of individuals it can infect. Baseline here is an unvaccinated population, not an idealized scenario with zero transmission among the vaccinated.

The reason I ask is because I think of how superbugs have come about and wonder if we’re not doing the same thing with COVID-19.

There's growing evidence that this is occurring; I'm not going to bother gathering links to articles/videos, the ideological mob toeing the mainstream narrative on HN is strong.

There are plenty of us who are interested so long as it’s not garbage like Twitter or Breitbart. The worst that can happen is your karma takes a hit.

Would be useful to have a list of the sites we currently consider garbage.

I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this commenting space is too narrow to contain.

We need the Sir Andy Wiles of HN to fill in the details! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27...

Personally, I'd love to see the links and have a look. No downvote on my part. Quite the contrary for posts that try to sincerely substantiate a contrarian argument. And agreed, there's lots of nearly hysterical ideological thinking on this site, by people who seem to justify just about any policy proposal so long as it claims to "stop the spread", and discount as "misinformation" even valid, reasoned criticisms of contentious mainstream policies.

From lioeters comment, supporting the argument:

> "They might serve as sort of a breeding ground for the virus to acquire new mutations."

Vaccines Could Drive The Evolution Of More COVID-19 Mutants - https://text.npr.org/965703047

This comment is pretty disingenuous, it's like you already know maybe your evidence is just some bullshit blogs and crackpots on YouTube, so you think: why post them and have your meaningless HN score go down?

Not at all. I've posted in the paste and the ideological mob who's already made up their mind to "trust the science" - toeing the mainstream narrative that "the science is decided" - assuming that there's consensus when there isn't - just brigade, and then most comments get hidden. It's tiring, and a flaw of most online forum structures have, allowing ideological individuals who don't actually care about the scientific process or finding the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Important factor is number of mutations. If vaccines cut the number of infections in half, it would be twice less mutations so two times less to generate a beneficial mutation. More we are able to cut down transmission, less possibility there is for mutations to occur.

> "They might serve as sort of a breeding ground for the virus to acquire new mutations."

Vaccines Could Drive The Evolution Of More COVID-19 Mutants - https://text.npr.org/965703047

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