1) the most contagious variants have emerged from countries with little to no vaccination: UK before vaccination and with very little protective measures (pubs, etc.), Brazil with Bolsonaro, India with a very high population density who are mostly unvaccinated, etc. These variants appear thanks to the high number of contaminations. Vaccination means fewer contaminations, and thus the less likely arising of mutations and a new variant.
2) Current vaccines are very effective against the current variants. This observation is inconsistent with the assumption that one of the variants could have been naturally selected to resist to vaccination. This is also expected as the percentage of vaccinated people is low in most parts of the world, thus there is little pressure to select a vaccine-resistant variant for now.
If we had made the variants "worse" because of imperfect vaccination, we would have seen a vaccine-resistant variant emerge from one of the vaccinated (>50%) countries.
It's looking extremely iffy right now as to whether it's even possible to achieve herd immunity against the current variants through vaccination, which will set up basically the perfect environment to select for vaccine escape globally: enough people vaccinated that it's a strong advantage, but the virus can still spread and infect more people in order to get a chance to adapt.
By "very little protective measures (pubs etc)" you mean the pubs were all closed? The UK has had some of the most restrictive lockdowns in the western world.
I agree that the idea that vaccines are leading to new variants seems extremely dubious though. Like everything else in epidemiology, when you go looking for the underlying rational basis for it, there's just nothing robust there.
No. First off, we still haven't had the level of death that we had in 1918, and almost certainly won't. Second, the narrative of vaccinated individuals being major spreaders of this disease is false. The virus is evolving due to mutations occurring while hopping from one unvaccinated person to another, full stop.
The UK now has a similar test positivity rate to what it had in November 2020 yet a hugely vaccinated population.
If the vaccinated aren't spreading it then you're suggesting that the unvaccinated have become drastically more infectious for no apparent reason and in ways that don't show up in contract tracing data. I think the alternative explanations are more likely to be correct: the vaccine is actually not a vaccine in the traditional sense, it's more like a prophylactic. Vaccinated people aren't getting an immune response in the normal areas where it would usually enter and exit, like the nose and lungs, instead it's being injected into the arm.
Also, COVID tests don't actually detect COVID or even SARS-CoV-2, they detect RNA debris from destroyed SARS-CoV-2. Thus it's expected that if someone's body fights off the virus immediately if they're exposed to it, they will still test positive.
The unvaccinated population is not uniformly distributed though. The vaccines is not rated for the age younger than 12 yet, and it will still take a while to roll it out in the younger age groups. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if most vaccine refusers are part of groups who collectively refuse to vaccinate. We know from measles outbreaks that this is often the case. Finally, most vaccines achieve their maximum effect only if both doses are given. If only one is given, all bets are off.
> Also, COVID tests don't actually detect COVID or even SARS-CoV-2, they detect RNA debris from destroyed SARS-CoV-2. Thus it's expected that if someone's body fights off the virus immediately if they're exposed to it, they will still test positive.
Slightly untrue. The particles gathered from infected and spreading persons are fully functional, by definition. To distinguish these cares from immune people, one would have to determine the percentage of viable virus particles. Hard to tell whether that's even feasible at scale. It's not too bad though. At worst this causes a higher than expected false-positive rate.
It's not rated for children because they appear to be immune to COVID and thus basically no safety results can possibly make the risk/reward tradeoff make sense in that age group.
"one would have to determine the percentage of viable virus particles. Hard to tell whether that's even feasible at scale ... It's not too bad though. At worst this causes a higher than expected false-positive rate."
I'm not sure you're aware of the scale of the problem. There have been studies that correlated PCR test results with ability to do viral culturing and concluded about 60% of all positive test results did not imply infectiousness. For example, this one:
> There have been studies that correlated PCR test results with ability to do viral culturing and concluded about 60% of all positive test results did not imply infectiousness.
My point was that the viral culturing might not be feasible for large-scale testing. In that case, we might have to stick to PCR.
Yes, governments use PCR because it's fast and mechanical.
The correct response to the PCR not detecting what people actually need to know is to shut down mass testing entirely. There is no point in mass testing if it creates chaos and doesn't help, which is what's happening (there is no correlation between testing levels and incidence levels, killing the theory that test test test = better results).
> you're suggesting that the unvaccinated have become drastically more infectious for no apparent reason
Isn't that the point of concern about the variants? Alpha is vastly more infectious than the original and delta is even more infectious than Alpha, which is the reason why they're able to become the dominant strain in unvaccinated populations (england in early 2021 & india with delta). Both have some immune escape but less than e.g. the gamma variant which hasn't become dominant in most countries with high vaccination rates.
(now, since the covid vaccines don't mean complete sterile immunity, just like all others, increased infectiousness also leads to problems)
The PCR tests do detect the virus if the body fought of the virus immediately, but can also measure the amount remaining (the cycle count) which has a cutoff point. Thus it often doesn't get counted as "infectious".
The antigen tests (the fast, cheap ones) don't trigger on small amounts, also leading to issues and that results in them being more-or-less useless to detect infected vaccinated people.
It's not clear they're actually more infectious. Claims that they are come from invalid methodologies like comparing the growth rate of one variant when it's new against the decline rate of another when it's old, or making assumptions like the one you just made above. Generally, it's good to treat any claim made by the field of epidemiology as suspect. They aren't incentivised to use statistics correctly.
In light of our findings that more than half of individuals with positive PCR test results are unlikely to have been infectious, RT-PCR test positivity should not be taken as an accurate measure of infectious SARS-CoV-2 incidence. Our results confirm the findings of others that the routine use of “positive” RT-PCR test results as the gold standard for assessing and controlling infectiousness fails to reflect the fact “that 50-75% of the time an individual is PCR positive, they are likely to be post-infectious”
There's two major metrics to measure the severeness: the mortality rate and the infection rate. I think that "we haven't had the level of death we had in 1918 so the pandemic is less severe" ignores the fact that COVID-19 is far more infectious and therefore in a sense more severe since it will be awfully hard to get rid of for that reason (if we can indeed never get rid of it the number of deaths will keep growing, so might eventually catch up)
Varicella is more infectious than SARS-CoV-2 and it's under control with vaccines, same pattern: spread through the air, R0 chickenpox > R0 COVID-19, vaccines help with immunity and even when infected developing a mild version of the disease.
There is hope, we might not get rid off it but if we could control chickenpox that is quite more infectious, we can have a little hope. Even more with more modern medicine.
This is very likely. And has already been said by various critics already months ago. But these people were silenced or ridiculed, because it apparently was already decided the vaccines need to be sold.
This has indeed been predicted by various experts but almost completely ignored. As seen in the comment below the strategy now is to blame those who are critical of our single minded vaccination strategy.
Completely untrue. The reservoir of selfish unvaccinated individuals is what is providing a place for Covid to hide and mutate. Vax critics were silenced and ridiculed because they are dangerous deceivers who need to be called out and held to account for the consequences of their lies.
So far, the "reservoir of selfish unvaccinated individuals" that the virus has mutated in is people who literally could not get vaccinated because there weren't enough vaccines available. The most important variants so far have showed up in the UK before any vaccines were approved, South Africa during their vaccine clinical trials (rendering the vaccine they were planning on using effectively useless), and India which is just too big to vaccinate quickly at current production levels.
You obviously need to check the database again then, because there are remarkably few cases where the person had a adverse reaction to the mRNA-based vaccine. Furthermore in the majority of those cases (of which were already slim to begin with), they are usually something like anaphylactic shock a.k.a. an allergic reaction which they can deal with at the time that the vaccine is administered.
It infuriates me that "armchair experts" who likely lack even a bachelors degree in STEM much less epidemiology think that they know better than the majority of medical professionals.
They are more likely to follow their advice of the mechanic who tells them that their catalytic converter needs to be replaced than a medical professional who has nearly a decade of specialized training.
That's not something that's ever been a problem with vaccines before.
Even if you have unshakeable faith in this evidence-free perversion of biological theory, nobody was claiming the vaccines will fail without 100% adoption last year when they launched. Their reception would have been rather different if that had been claimed, wouldn't it? So you can either believe this is true, in which case governments and pharma firms deceived people about the nature of the 'vaccine', or you can believe it's false and they didn't. But you can't believe it's true and it's the other people who are deceivers. That makes no logical sense.
It's a general issue with every vaccine against an illness that has a reservoir. The reservoir can be other species (birds and various other animals in case of influenza) or it can be human populations that for various reasons have not eliminated the spread of the illness yet (measles in countries that refuse or make it difficult to vaccinate, polio if not completely eradicated yet). In this reservoir the agent has opportunity to mutate, and it can never be excluded that at some point it makes inroads into populations again where it was eradicated before.
Global eradication of diseases has been achieved with smallpox and bovine rinderpest precisely because they had no natural reservoir and all vulnerable populations could be vaccinated. With Coronaviruses the situation is not so simple, but it should at least be possible to eradicate the currently relevant variant.
