How Vaccines Produce Virus Variants

There's an increasingly widespread belief among lay people that vaccines cause viruses to mutate. This sounds at first implausible. However, simple logic gives support to the notion.

We're told that the vaccine is 97% effective, which means that 3% of the vaccinated will get ill anyway. These people will have a thriving body of viruses in them, all largely unaffected by the vaccine. That's by definition a vaccine resistant strain. When passed onto others, such strains develop further resistance through natural selection, and we end up with a variant.

Making this worse is the fact that we have a large number of vaccines in production, all of them slightly different from their competitors. Each vaccine will therefore result in its own special variants, and we get a large number of variants in a matter of months. These variants will then mutate further when they infect people with other vaccines. A variant can in this way develop resistance to one vaccine variant after another until it's resistant to all vaccines.

The good thing about this process is that it will tend to reduce the lethality of the virus. Every mutation can only happen in patients that live long enough to pass it on. Hence, we get variants such as the much talked about Delta version, which is harmless to anyone who hasn't taken the vaccine. However, those who have taken a vaccine have saddled themselves with an agent that interferes in the normal operation of their immune system. The vaccine goes from being a benefit to a drag, and mortality rates among the vaccinated go up despite the natural tameness of the variant.

The end result of this is that we get the situation that we're now in where there are variants that are very dangerous to the vaccinated while completely harmless to the unvaccinated.

Wax plant