[TechBro8615]

The original comment that "vaccines do not cause mutations, period" was playing the same semantic game, by replying to a comment with a deliberate misinterpretation of its claims, which any reasonable reader would have understood to be referring to selection pressure from population bottlenecks, not the specific genomic process used by these drugs.

And actually, are the effects not basically the same? They both increase the likelihood of a new variant outcompeting existing variants, but in different ways - this drug increases the rate of mutations to new variants, whereas vaccination reduces the rate of mutations to existing variants. The effect in both cases is to favor new variants.

It's like how China banning Google and degrading service of US internet companies created an opportunity for domestic Chinese companies like Baidu to offer a lower-quality yet viable substitute to the firewalled service of its American counterpart, allowing them to grow their market-share to fund development toward feature parity with the original American apps.