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Comment by toper-centage | Hacker News Reader

I suppose its impossible to make a 5 year plan when the game is changing month after month. With countries having 50% vaccination rate, there's always place to brew new variants that might or not be resistant to vaccines and medicine.

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Is there any reason to believe being vaccinated means you're less of a breeding ground for variants? Surely it's not 100%, and if it's not, new variants will always come, including gradually evading vaccines, no?

Mutations evolve in infected people. Vaccines reduce infection, both directly and via reduced spread. Hence fewer mutations.

But muations happen all the time. Is a particular mutation viable, does it spread, then outcompete?

Thankfully emperical evidence shows thr neutralizing antibodies response, due to vaccination, reduces spread of COVID.

> With countries having 50% vaccination rate, there's always place to brew new variants that might or not be resistant to vaccines and medicine.

Is it true that new variants are more likely to evolve among more unvaccinated people? US has had significantly more cases that South Africa (per 100k people) for most of the time. I assume mutations are more likely to happen in places with more cases. Not sure if vaccine plays a selective pressure on vaccine mutation (bad or otherwise).

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=zaf&are...

You’re right. Mutations are more likely, the more infections you have.

Vacckne resistant strains of viruses tend to evolve in unvaccinated populations.

There's nothing indicating vaccines do anything to stop or make variants less likely. Arguably they could make more virulent variants more likely to survive.

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