Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by torben-friis 2006 days ago
I'm not sure I follow.

Why would vaccination increase the likelihood of new mutations, or mutations surviving better?

The only way I can see that reasoning working is that the mutation was somehow vaccine resistant but not resistant to the immune reaction we get after being sick with the comon corona, but it is not obvious to me that it would work that way, I would assume the opposite.
2 comments
Volundr 2005 days ago
Yeah this is sort of true on it's face, but doesn't really change anything. Of course if a virus is widely spread it's more likely to have vaccine escaping variants out there. If you vaccinate that population those vaccine escaping variants become dominant. Obviously this is less likely in a population with less cases. But you have to vaccinate that high case population eventually and the sooner you do it the better. No sense giving the virus more time to mutate.
link
AntiImperialis2 2005 days ago
>Why would vaccination increase the likelihood of new mutations, or mutations surviving better?

Our immune systems are general enough to face a wide variety of viruses, infections and strains.

When one is vaccinated, it gets prepared for that particular strain of a particular virus. The cost is that it could become more vulnerable to other infections... it's the cost/benefit of specialization vs generalization. Reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14970928/

The reason is that the immune system is highly optimized and it is optimized to be flexible enough to save enough individuals for the next generation. It is not optimized to save each and every individual against all possible infections. That is unnecessary, as far as evolution is concerned.

Having said that, vaccines generally don't weaken individuals to a slightly different variant of the same virus. It should rather strengthen it. The immune system expects the virus to mutate so it prepares for the mutations to an extent. In fact, a category of vaccines called live-attenuated vaccines are basically weakened strains of the same virus (these can sometimes mutate into dangerous strains, eg. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/polio-vaccination..., but that's a different discussion).

link