Posted on 07/10/2021 2:40:52 PM PDT by ransomnote
Mr. Jekielek: You’ve called the mass vaccination of COVID-19 the biggest gain-of-function experiment ever. What does that mean?
Dr. Weinstein: Well, what we are doing is unusual. We are deploying a novel technology that contains the code for a very narrow antigen signal, and we are deploying it into an active pandemic. And because the vaccines are not perfectly effective at preventing breakthrough cases, they are effectively exerting a very strong kind of selection on the virus.
And there’s every reason to worry that this selection will drive the evolution of escape mutants. That is to say selection in favor of mutations that make the virus invisible to the aware immune system that has been alerted by the vaccines. And that could produce an ongoing pandemic, where we might end the pandemic if we were to approach it differently.
Jekielek: So how is this different than in a typical situation where you would use traditional vaccines, for example?
Dr. Weinstein: Well, a traditional vaccine, you would deploy where there was a very low chance of contact and a long-lasting immunity. And what that means is that the majority of people who would encounter the pathogen would be immune by the time they did encounter it because the vaccine would have had time to fully develop the immunity and there would be negligible selection in favor of escape mutants.
In this case, what we have is two things. One, we have the incomplete effectiveness of the vaccines, which means that within people who have breakthrough cases, the immune system is exerting a selective pressure against variants that are easily seen and towards variants that—
SNIP
...in addition to people within whom you would have the selection is we also have people who are in the process of developing immunity because they’ve been vaccinated and they’re perhaps between the two vaccinations or the immune system is simply taking time to learn the lesson of the protein that is being used to train it. For those people, their incomplete immunity also constitutes an environment in which selection can cause the evolution of escape.
Weinstein has done some excellent interviews.
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