[firebacon]

Unless I'm misinterpreting the tweet, she suggests that a partial vaccination campaign will somehow lead to a higher rate of mutations?

As a non-biologist, it's not immediately obvious why that would be the case. What's the mechanism that increases the chance of mutations in vaccinated hosts?

[mlyle]

Vaccination will create pressures selecting for variants that escape vaccine-generated antibodies.

The vaccine is ~95% effective. This means you're going to have a lot of people get infected still with the vaccine's antibodies present; any mutation that happens that causes escape from these antibodies will prolong disease and increase transmission, even if that mutation renders the virus a bit less fit in a non-vaccinated host.

[majormajor]

> The vaccine is ~95% effective. This means you're going to have a lot of people get infected still with the vaccine's antibodies present; any mutation that happens that causes escape from these antibodies will prolong disease and increase transmission, even if that mutation renders the virus a bit less fit in a non-vaccinated host.

Is that an accurate summation of those who caught it after receiving the vaccine?

Seems like if 5% of virus strains circulating aren't affected by the vaccine, we're fucked anyway. That 5% will become 100% of what's circulating in the next year and will be ubiquitous?

If it's something like "5% of people don't respond to the vaccine to build antibodies at all," on the other hand, it's much rosier...

[firebacon]

Does the chance of seeing a vaccine-defeating mutation increase after injecting parts of the population with a less-effective vaccine (compared to the baseline scenario of no vaccinations at all)? What mechanism is responsible for that?

The answer is only obvious to me if both the original virus variant and the mutation compete for some kind of shared resource. But that shouldn't be the case here, right?