Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants? | Hacker News Reader

Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants?

wsj.com

26 pointspavanyara15 comments

That's a question that Ms. Finley would ask epidemiologists instead of the Opinion readers of the WSJ if she had any competence as a journalist. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/vaccines-will-not-...

> 10 Sept 2021

lol

The piece references several different recent publications.

The piece references and wrongly interprets recent publications instead of asking epidemiologists what they mean. Variants emerge by mutation and survive by evading immunity, both natural immunity from people who have gotten previous variants and vaccine-induced immunity. The only way to slow this is by reducing mutations, which means vaccinating as many people as possible, since gaining natural immunity means allowing the virus to replicate and thereby create more mutations.

Where specifically in the article do you believe that the publications are wrongly interpreted?

Your extremely naive and simplified view of how vaccination, mutation, and immune escape work is contradicted by many observed phenomena in epidemiology, which is often rife with subtle feedback mechanisms and surprising or counterintuitive outcomes. Not to mention the fact that the vaccines can't be reducing the number of mutations since they aren't preventing infections.

> Where specifically in the article do you believe that the publications are wrongly interpreted?

"Growing evidence also suggests that repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus’s rapid evolution."

"Experts nevertheless claim that boosters improve protection against XBB. That’s disinformation, to use their favored term." (Hilariously, her assertion that this is disinformation is directly contradicted by the previous sentence she herself wrote: "A bivalent booster only slightly increased antibodies against XBB.")

"But experts refuse to concede that boosters have yielded diminishing benefits and may even have made individuals and the population as a whole more vulnerable to new variants like XBB." A competent journalist would have asked the experts why.

"The Biden administration’s monomaniacal focus on vaccines over new treatments has left the highest-risk Americans more vulnerable to new variants. Why doesn’t that seem to worry the experts?" Once again, she clearly states that she knows that the experts have interpreted the data differently. I don't know how you could have asked me an easier question.

> Not to mention the fact that the vaccines can't be reducing the number of mutations since they aren't preventing infections.

The data show that not only are they vaccines reducing the number of infections, but they are reducing the lengths of infections that do occur, reducing the number of copies made and thereby reducing the number of mutations.

Oh FFS. Vaccination greatly reduces the severity of illness, which is to say it greatly reduces how many cells get infected and how much the virus is replicated in the body. This necessarily reduces the opportunity for a mutation to occur.

So tired of idiotic vaccination disinformation. It is always so goddamned moronic.

Your assumption that lesser severity of illness implies "greatly" reduced viral load is wrong (one might even say, moronic?):

> During the Omicron period (Fig. 1b), a recent 3rd-dose increases Ct among vaccinees, and is similar to infection-derived protection. Otherwise, the differences in Ct for the unvaccinated (adjusted Ct 25.9), 2-dose (adjusted Ct 25.7) and late 3-dose groups (adjusted Ct 25.8) are negligible (Fig. 1b). In general, the effect of immune status for Omicron is less pronounced than for Delta even upon recent receipt of the 3rd vaccine dose or a previous infection, as manifested by reduced Ct-values gaps between these groups and the unvaccinated.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33096-0

"Recent" here meant having had a booster within the past 70 days. Call me crazy, but I don't think boostering the entire population against SARS-CoV-2 every 70 days is a realistic strategy to prevent new variants, or likely to lead to good health outcomes. These numbers for Omicron were also a significant narrowing of the gap from Delta; it will be interesting to see what happens to it with the new variant referenced in the OP!

Your assumptions about others are not constructive.

Two variants having different symptoms per viral load says nothing about the topic. Claiming it is possible to prevent all mutations with an extreme regiment also makes the wrong point for you. Obviously you understand how the vaccination is reducing mutation then.

This opinion piece is written by an absolutely unqualified talking head, not an epidemiologist.

> Allysia Finley is a member of the Journal's Editorial Board. Ms. Finley joined The Wall Street Journal in 2009 after graduating from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies. During college, she edited the opinions section for The Stanford Review and wrote columns for The Orange County Register.

Lacking any science training whatsoever, she is less qualified to write this column than most HN readers.

This seems to be presenting an inverted fact. The places with higher vaccination have less variants, this is because most are insufficiently fit. There are less possibilities of hybrids (or complex evolutionary paths) if only the most significant strain is viable.

This sounds verboten.

News is the content someone doesn't want printed. The rest is advertising.

Note that this was published in the opinion section.

Yes, obviously. Why, were you born yesterday?

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