As far as responses go, that one isn’t too bad. (Yes, I’m grading on a curve?)
What did he say in response to Cooper’s question about those under 12? I really don’t want my kids vaccinated, and I’m worried this will be an issue in the very near future.
There’s evidence that vaccines quench? immunity after contracting the virus or 2x doses. 04:40-ish
You need to watch the three hours. I’m watching it now. Everyone can learn something by listening to genuine experts.
What you’re suggesting is wrong. It’s easy to show that it’s wrong by considering the limits. According to you:
The first statemant cannot be not true because even the experts admit that, unlike all other vaccines marketed to date, COVID vaccines only reduce your chance of infection by about 50-75%, and if you are infected, you basically “look like” an unvaccinated person, except that (a) you’ll have fewer symptoms and you’ll be out there spreading it around and (b) by definition, the virus reproducing in your body is good at evading vaccine-induced immunity.
The second statement is quite obviously not true, except in the very narrow case where a vaccine-evading mutant also has an evolutionary advantage in an unvaccinated individual (which is completely possible, but will be relatively rare).
In the uk, they said the vaccine reduces your chance of getting it 50 percent. If that is the case, breakthrough infections aren’t rare, are they?
So I’m supposed to address hypothetical scenarios that do not exist now nor will ever exist in the real world?
Why do they have booster shots for mumps and measles? Same reason they would have them for covid.
Unvaccinated populations drive the spread which drives the mutations which are random. There’s a reason breakthrough infections will occur in greater numbers the more unvaccinated people you have. The mutations that dominate tend to be those that spread easier. The more often these mutations occur the more likely a random mutation will be more virulent or evade vaccines. But the mutations are not being driven by the vaccinated, they are being slowed by the vaccinated as with any vaccine.
Statistically they are rare. But thanks for the anecdote. Key point you’re missing is the more viral transmission you have the more breakthrough infections you will have. If more people are infected overall, you will have increased numbers of breakthrough cases. If a large portion of the population remains un-vaccinated, transmission will continue to increase leading to more breakthrough infections.
Again, the unvaccinated are causing transmission to increase, not the vaccinated.
Overall, less than 0.2 percent of the participants reported a breakthrough infection, with such cases more likely in people already considered to be vulnerable, including older adults or people with underlying illnesses.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00460-6/fulltext
First cite a source, second what are your chances if the % of vaccinated increased? Your chance of getting it is never constant. There are factors you’re ignoring that drive that chance.
None of that explains my motivation. Address my argument instead of trying to find my motivation. Regardless if anyone I know died or not, the concepts I provided plenty of evidence for apply to the spread of any virus. Vaccinations slow down mutations not the other way around. Otherwise, why would we ever have vaccines?
Vaccines are meant to be effective, breakouts are a cause for concern because the mutation is more likely to be resistant to the vaccine and hence prove to be more deadly. A random mutation is unlikely to react to the vaccine in such a way with an unvaccinated person, because it’s not there.
Think about it in the same way someone doesn’t finish their full course of antibiotics, what happens then is the remaining bacteria that wasn’t finished off comes back with a resistance to the antibodies.
This is a well known phenomena by the way and while no one is saying it will happen and certainly no one would want it to happen it is a legitimate concern that breakout cases are occurring so frequently.
That you have a group to point to for the fear you feel makes your decision acceptable. What happens when, not if, everyone eventually contracts the virus? Who will be on the other side of the line from you? It’s not an us/them dichotomy. Think of it more of an us/it one and you’ll be more accepting of people who’ve taken a different route to personal health than you.
Plenty of research to show increased viral transmission (i.e. lots of unvaccinated people) leads to more mutations (i.e. more variants) and thus a greater chance of vaccine resistant or antibody evading viruses.
Population-level resistance occurs more quickly at higher viral mutation rates
The SARS-CoV-2 mutation rate is a key parameter that determines how quickly the virus will acquire resistance to antibody interventions. While we estimated the per transmission rate of generating an antibody escape mutant at 1x10-4 (Methods), differences between antibody epitope sizes or changes in the mutation rate of the virus population over time [24] could influence this effective mutation rate. Our analysis revealed that many individuals would be infected with single or double SARS-CoV-2 mutants at a range of mutation rates greater than 1x10-5 (Fig 5A and 5B), while at higher mutation rates even triple and quadruple mutants will occur at sufficient frequencies to quickly establish in the population (Fig 5C and 5D). Similarly, we found that resistance to antibody combinations requiring two or fewer mutations for resistance would establish quickly after widespread presence of nAbs (Fig 5E and 5F). With a higher mutation rate (1x10-3 per transmission), resistance could emerge against even combinations of nAbs that require the acquisition of 4 mutations (Fig 5H).
I don’t need to cite a source. I’ve posted the video of our chief medical officer before. Go and find it or go back to cnn. Doesn’t bother me.
No vaccine is 100%. Look at the case of the MMR. If there millions of people are unvaccinated for mumps, measles, rubella etc. you would have many breakthrough infections. They’d be statistically rare but the number would be significant if the number of unvaccinated is also large.
Mutations are random. The virus has no agenda whether a vaccine exists or not. However the more chances a virus has to replicate, the more chances it will mutate into something that can evade a vaccine or an antibody. It’s an odds game. Limiting the spread decreases the odds.
One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella. Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps.
No thanks. Point still stands. Deceased chances = decreased spread.
I agree. Decreased chances. Not rare though.
You’re ignoring millions of unvaccinated driving transmission.
Amongst all this talk of vaccines, what percentage of the planet has actually died ‘from Covid?’
And with possibly up to 50% of people already having pre-immunity to it, and Covid affecting mainly elderly with multiple comorbidities, what’s the the actual need for eternal twice-yearly Covid vaccines for every single man, woman, otherwise-gendered and child?
No vaccine is 50% either, which (+/-10%) is the effectiveness being quoted by everyone except the US media.
Survival of mutations is not random. The paper you quoted (PLOS) actually refutes what you’re saying here.
“The virus” is constantly evolving and responding to selection pressures placed upon it; and as FairComment implied, our immune systems respond and adapt, which is why 99.94% of the people who were alive last year are still alive today.
No it doesn’t. The occurrence of mutations is random that says nothing about their survival.
Their occurrence - the point you keep dodging. Do more mutations occur in populations of vaccinated or unvaccinated individuals?
So you’re telling me Delta came out of India because India was overwhelming vaccinated and it was responding to vaccine pressures? 
I think you fundamentally misunderstand how natural selection works. Mutations arise all the time at a fairly high rate. Most of them are useless - they confer no survival advantage. Some of them are error-corrected out. Very occasionally one will have a survival advantage in some specific context, and if it does then it will reproduce to a greater extent than the population around it. That advantage does not necessarily generalize to other contexts; more often that not, the reverse is true.
I’m not “dodging” it. I’m pointing out that it’s largely irrelevant. Only survival matters. If a particular mutation arises in an unvaccinated individual that, by chance, is devastatingly effective at evading vaccine-induced immunity, so what? That particular virus (one single organism) will most likely have no survival advantage in that host compared to its cousins. It will therefore disappear without trace, or at best become a minor representative in a modestly-diverse gene pool. If by chance it is transmitted to a vaxed individual who becomes sick, then that is where the genetic sieving takes effect. The implication is that, given a leaky vaccine, you want to minimize the number of people who can enable this gain-of-function effect, ie., leave as many as possible unvaccinated.
Bear in mind that virus reproduction is asexual so there is no chance of the more sophisticated mechanisms of gene survival and mixing that can occur in higher organisms.
But to answer your question: it’s clearly occurring in both populations at more-or-less the same rate, because vaccines do not suppress infection to a remarkably higher degree than what we might call “natural immunity”. This is hardly surprising.
No. It was responding to pressures - in this case, it was simply better at surviving in unvaccinated hosts (and vaccinated ones, as it turns out). Vaccine pressure is not the only pressure that exists. Everything that reproduces is subject to evolutionary pressures, all the time. In an unvaccinated population, obviously, the primary selection pressure is the host immune response.
Not if the virus is unable to replicate due to antibodies created by a vaccine or any other preventive measure that slows the spread. The rate of mutation will increase as transmission increases, if transmission is prevented the rate of mutation will decrease. Viruses do not mutate at a constant rate but instead are influenced by external factors.
Take a simple example of natural selection, if you sterilized half the population (vaccinated) of Darwin’s finches would they contribute to natural selection? Obviously not. Only those that could reproduce would have mutations occur (unvaccinated).
Wrong because both populations are not being infected at the same rate so the virus cannot replicate at the same rate. I’ve posted numerous research to this effect.
The reason a mutation survived that was more contagious to begin with is because the alpha mutation had millions of chances to mutate over and over with few preventive measures to stop or slow spread. It’s a game of odds. The more you flip the coin the more likely a particular outcome will occur. The more a virus mutates the more likely you will have a strain that is more contagious, evades antibodies etc.
Theory of Probability
We assume that in any particular individual trial of the experiment, the outcome for that individual trial cannot be predicted or known before hand - it is controlled by chance. However, when a very large number of independent trials of the experiment are performed, one finds that each possible outcome occurs a well defined fraction of the time. This fraction is called the probability for that particular outcome to occur. The probability for an outcome is always a number between 0 and 1. If the probability is zero, we say that this outcome can never occur. If the probability is one, we say that this outcome always occurs with complete certainty.
Examples:
When we flip a coin a very large number of times, we find that we get half heads, and half tails. We conclude that the probability to flip a head is 1/2, and the probability to flip a tail is 1/2.
When we role a die a very large number of times, we find that we get any given face 1/6 of the time. The probability for the 1 face to appear is therefore 1/6. Similarly the probability for the 2 (3, 4, 5, or 6) face to appear is also 1/6.