Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xenophonf 1777 days ago
Universal vaccination is how you kill it completely, like we did with smallpox and almost did with polio.
3 comments

On Polio "The fact that the virus can only survive in humans (and no other animals) makes it possible to completely eradicate the disease from the world – if it was a virus with an animal host such as influenza (birds) or tuberculosis (cows) that occasionally mutates to attack humans, polio could only ever be controlled but not eradicated."

Covid transmits in animals. CDC says based on current data, transmission to human is low (but not impossible) but more studies are needed. The fact they can get it is already not on the same scale as smallpox or polio.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...

This is next level as neither of those had animal reservoirs.
Nope. The virus can already spread among vaccinated.
The OP alleges it can't sufficiently mutate among the vaccinated, so their recommendation of full vaccination to eliminate the virus is perfectly consistent. Opening up and letting everyone get delta, vaccinated or not, is going to happen sooner and is not good because passing through the unvaccinated will cause many new mutations some of which might start new waves.
That's not at all what the paper says.

>The OP alleges it can't sufficiently mutate among the vaccinated, so their recommendation of full vaccination to eliminate the virus is perfectly consistent.

From the study:

"We conclude that the virus becomes more contagious as it is screened through the vaccinated population and the resultant strain becomes the dominant strain and able to infect the entire population."

The main takeaway from the paper is that the vaccinated are driving new variants.

>Opening up and letting everyone get delta, vaccinated or not, is going to happen sooner and is not good because passing through the unvaccinated will cause many new mutations some of which might start new waves.

Again, the paper states the vaccinated are driving new mutations. Technically due to natural immunity, the unvaccinated who have been previously infected are now in a better position than the vaccinated. They don't contract, get sick or spread whereas the vaccinated do. The big exception is unvaccinated who have never been infected by this coronavirus or any other past coronavirus. They are still susceptible to infection, spread, etc.

> The main takeaway from the paper is that the vaccinated are driving new variants.

Filtering is the takeaway, one dominant strain and orders of magnitude less variations since most variation is not viable in a vaccinated public.

If we have a highly variable virus that never goes away. That is the flu.

No, not all of them