Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

Re:Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan t... by pdonis on Thursday December 02, 2021 @07:05PM (#29424826)

> I'm extremely uncomfortable with granting a novel coronavirus a gigantic reservoir of freely available incubators to infect and try out new ways to use the human body for its own goals

Then you should be extremely uncomfortable with vaccine mandates, because this is exactly what mass vaccination is doing. Since none of the vaccines prevent people from getting COVID or passing it on to others, the vaccines are creating an evolutionary environment where there is high selection pressure for the virus to evolve variants that resist the vaccines. Mandating vaccines just makes that worse.

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Re:Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan t... by kmonad on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:01PM (#29426152)

the vast majority of viral replications take place in susceptible infected bodies, i.e. predominantly those of unvaccinated individuals. variants, therefore, mostly arise among unvaccinated. sometimes, by chance, a variant then may emerge that is able to evade some of the vaccine induced immunity. unvaccinated individuals therefore represent a source of escape variants, and therefore jeopardize the success of vaccine campaigns.

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Re:Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan t... by pdonis on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:34PM (#29426644)

> the vast majority of viral replications take place in susceptible infected bodies, i.e. predominantly those of unvaccinated individuals.

I'm not sure this is true, but even if it is, this...

> variants, therefore, mostly arise among unvaccinated.

...does not follow from it. The key thing driving evolution of variants is not number of replications but selective pressure. Selective pressure is much larger in a vaccinated individual than an unvaccinated individual (or at least an unvaccinated individual that has not had COVID and does not have natural immunity).

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Re:Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan t... by kmonad on Friday December 03, 2021 @08:43AM (#29429905)

Selection can drive evolution, and in a vaccinated body there exist other selection pressures than in an unvaccinated body. Variants which may by chance be suited well to strive in a new environment need to arise first. This will happen only when replication occurs. The unvaccinated population is the major breeding ground for variants, not the other way around.

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