the pressure on the virus to mutate increases.
= = =
I don’t get it.
Where does this pressure come from? I thought mutations were random, and the beneficial changes survived.
How does the virus know it needs to step up the mutations, and what direction to take?
Where does this pressure come from? I thought mutations were random, and the beneficial changes survived.
If mutations are random, mutations that can evade vaccines easily will spread more easily among vaccinated people and become dominant among them.
The vaccine encourages the production of one antibody. This makes it likely that mutations that can evade that antibody will become dominant.
How does the virus know it needs to step up the mutations, and what direction to take?
It’s what viruses do.
Imagine a car trying to get out of a maze....keeps hitting walls (the “vax”)...it’s going to keep trying to ‘escape’, until no wall (un- “vax”d)....the more it releases/escapes, the less virulent it becomes, because it runs out of gas (weakens), eventually. That’s what viruses do.
The maze wall just refuels it.
(Best layman example that I can come up with, on short notice :)
Mutations are random. They aren’t “guided” anywhere.
But - I’m guessing that some mutations are naturally stronger than others. So lets say the original version is stronger (and then probably more numerous) than the Delta version. Both versions are around at the same time. I’m guessing by now we have dozens of versions of the virus in our bodies and the air.
But - use a vaccine to reduce the effectiveness of the original version and the Delta becomes more numerous. I guess it is a crap shoot on if the new version(s) will be more deadly or easier to transmit or whatever.
Mutations are random. They are the result of incorrect pairing that is not corrected.
Fun fact - the first sars virus mutated itself out of being able to infect humans.Just as everyone was preparing to panic.
The mutations don’t change, the selection is what changes.
Poor or “leaky” vaccines allow replication and infection to occur, but suppress the original variant.
Absent the vaccine the original variant tends to win out for the same reason it was dominant to begin with.
Keep in mind that a more lethal variant of a virus tends to spread more slowly because it makes its host sicker and kills minimizing the social interactions that spread the virus. Less dangerous variants spread faster.
If you get a vaccine that works by minimizing symptoms rather than infection, a lethal variant can spread as well as a non-lethal variant.
You might think, “no problem, I just need to get vaccinated.”. Actually, that is a far worse problem — you make the human race dependent on that vaccine for it’s survival. That’s the case with Marek’s disease in chickens.