"the *vaccinated* still get the virus but are only protected from the spike protein - making them walking petri dishes for a mutation because the rest of the virus isn’t attacked."
Professor Luke O’Neill, an immunologist at Trinity College Dublin, told Euronews in April 2021 that, “Vaccines bring out the human immune system to kill the virus, that stops it replicating and therefore the chance of variants emerging is decreased.”
None of the COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S. and Europe contain a live COVID-19 virus, and thus cannot create a variant or allow vaccinated individuals to infect others.
Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told NewsGuard in a March 2021 email that the approved vaccines “are not complete viruses and so cannot replicate a new variant that can infect others. Some types of vaccine use attenuated whole viruses and these can generate variants that could theoretically pass on to others, but the COVID-19 vaccines are not of that type and so cannot do that.”
A 2018 article about the possibility that viruses can evolve to evade vaccines is trending on social media. The article was shared online by the self-declared “inventor” of mRNA vaccines, who is a vocal opponent of COVID-19 vaccination, in a post claiming that COVID-19 vaccines are creating new variants. The post received nearly 19,000 engagements. While the article, which was published more than a year before SARS-CoV-2 was identified, argues that vaccine-driven evolution of viruses may be possible, there is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has evolved in this way. New COVID-19 variants develop when mutations occur during viral replication. Viruses can’t replicate outside of a host—in this case, human cells—so preventing a virus from infecting cells in the first place prevents it from reproducing and mutating.
ADE-ridden superspreaders.
*see Israel