Why COVID-19 Vaccines Cannot Stop the Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 Variants

Introduction

The “public health” establishment has been deliberately lying to the public in order to manufacture consent for the policy goal of achieving high uptake of COVID-19 vaccines.

As I’ve been extensively documenting, this includes lying from the start about the effectiveness of natural immunity compared to the immunity induced by vaccination. Due to the inferiority of natural immunity, we’ve been endlessly told, people who have already recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection still need to get vaccinated to be able to have effective immunity.

Relatedly, the official disinformation about natural immunity has been accompanied by claims that everyone must get vaccinated to prevent the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The more unvaccinated people there are, the argument goes, the more chances that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, has to infect people and spread, and therefore the more chances it has to mutate into a variant that could be more infectious, cause more severe disease, or escape the population’s existing immune defenses.

By getting vaccinated, we’ve repeatedly been told, we will be denying the virus the opportunity to evolve.

This might sound superficially plausible, just as many people believed the early false claims that rapidly waning antibodies in people who had recovered from COVID-19 meant that they were quickly losing their natural immunity.

People were susceptible to that disinformation because, as a result of the pre-pandemic vaccine propaganda with which we were always bombarded since early childhood, they had already been indoctrinated into the false belief that circulating antibodies equal immunity; therefore, more antibodies equals better immunity and fewer antibodies equals less immunity.

Similarly, the claims that everyone needs to get vaccinated to stop SARS-CoV-2 from evolving must surely sound plausible to anyone indoctrinated into the false belief that the COVID-19 vaccines stopped infection and transmission of the virus.

It is no secret at this point in time that the vaccines are not highly effective at preventing infection and transmission. And yet, we continue to see the argument coming from the “public health” establishment and the major media that we all need to get vaccinated to stop new variants from emerging.

The false claims about rapidly waning natural immunity depended on concealing from the public the fact that it is normal for antibody levels to wane quickly at first from peak levels reached after an acute infection, and that this is consistent with immunologists’ understanding of how long-term immunity develops. The deception depended further on concealing the fact that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicated that natural immunity would be robust, broad, and durable—likely to last  for decades if not a lifetime.

Similarly, the false claims that the COVID-19 vaccines can stop SARS-CoV-2 from evolving depend on concealing from the public the fact that mass vaccination itself incontrovertibly puts selective pressure on the virus to mutate into an escape variant.

The deception depends on concealing the fact that it is understood within the scientific community that escape variants are more likely to emerge under conditions of suboptimal immunity.

It depends on obfuscating the fact, also uncontroversial in the scientific literature, that suboptimal immunity is precisely what the vaccines deliver.

Early Renditions of the Propaganda Claim

This disinformation about SARS-CoV-2 being unable to evolve in vaccinated people has been routinely repeated by “public health” authorities, health care providers, and the media. So that you can see I’m not mischaracterizing the arguments used to support that claim, I did a quick online search and immediately found numerous illustrative examples.

A snapshot of what we were being told early into the mass vaccination campaign is provided by an editorial in the Des Moines Register on March 24, 2021. The article consisted of an interview with a local emergency room physician, Dr. Tom Benzoni. When invited to comment about virus variants, Dr. Benzoni repeated the official propaganda as follows (emphasis added):

The first thing is the simplest: Get vaccinated so we stop making variants. Every time someone gest COVID, they provide a chance for another variant to emerge. You get infected because you didn’t get a vaccine and you may make a new variant that may kill someone else.

The newspaper editors broadcast that medical advice with the headline “Get vaccinated to protect yourself and prevent variants that may kill others, says ER doc”.

On March 31, 2021, Newsday published an article with a headline similarly instructing people to “get vaccinated” to “stop variants”. That article cited Dr. Chidubem Iloabachie, an associate chairperson with the department of emergency medicine at a hospital in New York, who “said while variants were of concern because they could be more infectious, and possibly more virulent, what medical experts knew was vaccines ‘give good resistance to all the variants’ and those who had been vaccinated remained at low risk for getting—and spreading—COVID-19”.

Thus, the clear message was that if you got vaccinated, you could no longer get infected with and spread any variants of SARS-CoV-2.

The Evolution of a New Variant of the Propaganda Claim

At that time both of those articles were published, the CDC was maintaining that everyone who had already recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection still needed to get vaccinated on the grounds that natural immunity offered insufficient protection.

The CDC argued that the duration of immunity induced by infection was unknown, deliberately withholding from the public the fact that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly favored the conclusion that natural immunity was robust, broad, and durable.

Earlier in March, the CDC had also begun advising fully vaccinated individuals—but not naturally immune individuals—that they could go about their normal activities without wearing a facemask. The implicit message, again, was that the vaccines—but not natural immunity—would prevent infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

Then, in July, CDC researchers observed how 74% of COVID-19 cases in a large outbreak in Massachusetts were fully vaccinated. They further observed how fully vaccinated individuals had a “viral load” equal to that of unvaccinated people, suggesting equal contagiousness.

The empirical reality that fully vaccinated people were getting infected and spreading the coronavirus is what promptly led the CDC to reverse its recommendation for fully vaccinated people; the CDC began advising them once again to wear a mask when out in public.

Because of that admission, it was necessary for the propaganda claim about stopping virus evolution to also evolve. The new spin was that vaccination by itself was insufficient to stop the virus from evolving; in addition to getting fully vaccinated, people still had to heed the other guidelines from the CDC such as to wear a mask and maintain “social distancing”—a term that had long since become a colloquial euphemism for extreme lockdown measures like stay-at-home orders and business closures.

At the end of July, a modeling study was published in which the authors concluded that “non-pharmaceutical interventions”—which had become the code word in the literature for authoritarian lockdown measures—would still be necessary even after a large proportion of the population had become fully vaccinated. This led to a fresh round of news media headlines insisting that we all must get vaccinated to stop SARS-CoV-2 from evolving, but with the new twist that vaccination alone couldn’t get the job done.

They day the study was published, CNN presented the revised propaganda narrative to us with its headline: “Vaccination is not enough by itself to stop the spread of variants, study finds”. The article quoted one of the study’s authors, Simon Rella, concluding that “people need to wear masks and take other steps to prevent spread until almost everyone in a population has been vaccinated.”

The implicit message thus remained that, if we could achieve a near 100% vaccination rate, then we could stop SARS-CoV-2 from evolving; and we must stop its evolution, so everybody must get vaccinated.

Savvy news consumers who read the whole article, however, could pick up on a clue about what the science really said about the effect of mass vaccination on viral evolution. Further down the page, we could learn from Fyodor Kondrasho, one of Rella’s colleagues, that “By having a situation where you vaccinate everybody, a vaccine-resistant mutant actually gains a selective advantage.”

This posed a conundrum: how could both things be true at the same time? How could it be true that mass vaccination could stop the virus from evolving while also being true that vaccinating everybody would drive the natural selection of variants capable of escaping vaccine-induced immunity?

Illustrating the cognitive dissonance required to sustain the propaganda narrative, Kondrashov nevertheless reasoned that “By preventing spread of vaccine resistant strains, you are preventing evolution of this virus.”

CNN’s readers perceptive enough to pick up on it were left on their own to puzzle over the irreconcilable self-contradiction.

Setting aside the hypothetical situation of COVID-19 vaccines that actually stopped infection and transmission, the critically thinking reader might further wonder: How can a vaccine that does not stop the spread of the virus cause the virus to stop evolving?

That was where the need for obedience to other measures such as lockdowns and mask mandates came in. The logical corollary was that we must accept living indefinitely under authoritarian governance, presumably to include vaccine mandates, “passport” systems, or other means of coercion.

Once again, the argument presented in favor of mass vaccination raised more questions than it answered. For one, the proposed solution continued to completely ignore the existence of natural immunity. Everyone who is unvaccinated must get vaccinated was the message.

Setting that aside, the argument also assumed that measures like lockdowns and mask mandates are highly effective at preventing transmission, which has not proven to be the case. (That’s a topic for another article, but it suffices to observe that the effects that policymakers said their policies would have on the epidemic waves never materialized in the data.)

This was not mere cognitive dissonance. The claim—that if only everyone were to obey their overlords by complying with lockdown measures, wearing a mask everywhere, and getting fully vaccinated, then we could have stopped SARS-CoV-2 from evolving—was outright delusional.

The delusion was propagated elsewhere, obligatorily. A Medscape headline the same day stated, “Vaccination Alone Won’t Counter Rise of Resistant Variants: Study”.

The headline of a WebMD article on August 2, 2021, similarly declared, “Vaccination Alone Won’t Stop Rise of Resistant Variants”. While “vaccination is the best strategy to control viral spread”, WebMD maintained, people still needed to follow the other guidelines even after being vaccinated.

WebMD quoted Kondrashov asserting that obedience “decreases the possibility that a vaccine-resistant strain is running around.” It was necessary for everyone to obey their overlords “to prevent . . . the evolution of novel variants”.

The article also quoted Rella implicitly advocating continuance of strict policy measures by saying, “Every infected individual is like a mini-bioreactor, increasing the risk that mutations will appear that will endow the virus with the property of avoiding the immune system primed by a vaccine.”

However, that article, too, left readers another breadcrumb pointing to the truth. Paraphrased by WebMD, Rella said that, while “obvious” that vaccination would help stop virus evolution, what was not as obvious was that “when most people are vaccinated, a vaccine-resistant strain has an advantage over the original strain and spreads faster.”

So, which was it? Mass vaccination would stop virus evolution, or it would place evolutionary pressure on the virus to select for an escape mutant? It couldn’t possibly be both!

Again paraphrased by WebMD, Rella illustrated his own cognitive dissonance by opining that “we can stop it”.

That continually repeated claim was not a scientific statement but a statement of dogma from faithful adherents to the vaccine religion, who were promoting these pharmaceutical products dutifully, masquerading as scientific or medical experts to serve as salespeople issuing false advertising claims that could result in prosecution for fraud were those claims to have come directly from the manufacturers.

Just as enlighteningly, at the end of the article, readers could learn that the “worst-case scenario” would be if there needed to be “rounds of ‘vaccine development playing catch up in the evolutionary arms race against novel strains.”

Of course, such an outcome probably wouldn’t turn out so bad for the profits of the pharmaceutical companies.

Why the Only Plausible Outcome of Mass Vaccination Was Always the ‘Worst-Case Scenario’

The so-called “worst-case scenario” had the benefit of being the most plausible and the most probable outcome—which we can now see easily with hindsight, but which many who were accused of spreading “misinformation” had the foresight to warn about early on. (I am among those who maintained from the start that mass vaccination itself would put evolutionary pressure on SARS-CoV-2 to mutate to escape the inferior immunity induced by vaccines.)

The best-case scenario that the policy advocates said could be achieved if we were all just to obey “public health” authorities, on the other hand, was always a pipe dream.

The greatest conjurer of the illusion was of course the CDC itself, as we learned on September 26, 2021, from a CNN headline: “Want to help prevent more variants down the road? Get vaccinated, CDC director says”.

CNN directly quoted CDC Director Rochelle Walensky as follows (emphasis added):

Our goal right now is to stay ahead of the virus. We want to boost now so we don’t end up in a vulnerable place. . . . We will see if we can get the amount of transmission down in this country, and truly around the world, which we are also working to do, and then we are anticipating and hoping we will not have more mutations that will require more boosting in the future.

The big lie that Walensky was telling with that remark was that the reason “booster” shots were now being recommended for people who had already been fully vaccinated was only because the predominant Delta variant partially escaped the immunity induced by vaccines.

The boosters, she was implicitly lying, would adapt the immune response of vaccinated individuals to be more specific to the Delta variant; no additional boosters would be required as long enough people help stop the virus from further evolving by getting the supposedly durable immunity from vaccination.

Dr. Walensky cannot have been unaware that she was spouting unscientific nonsense. She cannot have been unaware that the message she was communicating was untrue.

As Walensky must surely have known, a booster dose would not expand or adapt the immune response to be more specific to the Delta variant. Instead, what it would do would be to restore a higher level of circulating antibodies that would still be specific to the original Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2, which was by then extinct outside of laboratories.

Another truth that Walensky was vainly trying to conceal from the public was that had the Delta variant never emerged, vaccinated people would still have been getting infected because of the rapidly waning immunity induced by vaccination.

“Reduction in vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infections over time”, the authors of a study in The Lancet in October 2021 concluded, “is probably due to waning immunity with time rather than the delta variant escaping vaccine protection.”

Earlier this month, a study in JAMA likewise observed that the data were “consistent with a steady decline in estimated mRNA vaccine effectiveness over time, separate from variant-specific differences in protection.”

At the time Walensky was vainly attempting to maintain the illusion that the vaccines induced long-term immunity, the CDC was also conjuring up the big lie that vaccine-induced immunity was superior to the immunity acquired from infection.

In truth, the scientific evidence overwhelmingly favored the conclusion that natural immunity was far more protective.

Indeed, in the scientific literature, natural immunity was routinely upheld as the benchmark that vaccine manufacturers should aim for with their products, and the literature was replete with studies commenting about the various shortcomings of the COVID-19 vaccines, with scientists essentially competing with each other to produce the most valuable insights about the necessity for and the means to develop vaccines that did a better job of mimicking the immune responses to infection.

The CDC naturally could not go on concealing the truth from the public forever, though. CDC researchers have now finally admitted that, compared to the protection afforded by being fully vaccinated, people with natural immunity had significantly greater protection against the Delta variant.

Censorship and the Utility of Official Disinformation

A key lesson to be learned is that, from the perspective of the government and the mainstream media’s “fact checkers” who dogmatically recite the proclamations from the high priests of the vaccine religion, the spread of misinformation is perfectly fine, provided that it aligns with the adopted political agenda.

Telling truths that don’t align with the policy goal of getting everybody vaccinated, on the other hand, is strictly prohibited.

This is usefully illustrated by a “fact check” article from one of Facebook’s partners in censorship, PolitiFact, which is a publication of the Poynter Institute. The supposed “fact check” article insisted that “COVID-19 vaccines do not create the virus’s variants”. Rather, we were told, it is “slow vaccine uptake” that “can lead to the development of variants”.

The logical corollary of that assertion was that if policymakers could achieve a vaccination rate of 100%, then it would not be possible for SARS-CoV-2 to evolve.

Once again, astute readers who continued further down the page could read the admission that viruses evolve “in order to escape immunity”, regardless of whether that immunity was “vaccine-induced or natural”.

That self-contradiction naturally posed an obstacle for the purpose of the “fact check” article, so how did the author, Samantha Putterman, deal with that conundrum? Simple! “The difference”, she boldly lied, “is that people who are vaccinated are better protected against such variants.”

Another partner in social media censorship, Lead Stories, likewise treated us to the headline, “Fact Check: COVID-19 Vaccines Are NOT Growing New Variants Inside the Bodies of Vaccinated People”. It was “not true”, author Ed Payne maintained, that new variants were “growing” inside of vaccinated people.

Logically, for that assertion to be true, it must mean that SARS-CoV-2 does not undergo mutation as it replicates in the cells of an infected vaccinated person, which is false. Hence, the fundamental premise of the argument presented by the faux “fact checker” could be fairly described as anti-science.

Never minding the science, Payne obligatorily looked to the high priesthood for guidance on how to supposedly debunk the idea that the virus still mutates when infecting vaccinated people: the CDC, Payne preached, said it was a “myth” that mass vaccination could “create or cause variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.” And if the CDC said it, it must be true!

How The Vaccine Faithful Still Cling to the Untenable Propaganda

In sum, the message we have been repeatedly bombarded with is that mass vaccination cannot put evolutionary pressure on SARS-CoV-2 to mutate to escape the immunity induced by vaccines—it is only absence of immunity or natural immunity that enables this to occur.

The propaganda claim that everyone must get vaccinated to stop the coronavirus from evolving persisted even after it had become obvious from the data and openly acknowledged by the “public health” authorities that COVID-19 vaccines do not stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

Epitomizing the cognitive dissonance was a headline from the Henry Ford Health System on September 27, 2021: “Another Reason To Get Vaccinated? To Stop Variants From Developing”.

“One reason why everyone must get vaccinated”, the health care provider argued, “is to stop new variants from developing. The more opportunities a virus has to replicate itself, the more opportunities it has to mutate and become more severe.”

The article quoted infectious disease specialist Dr. Allison Weinmann saying, “If more people don’t get vaccinated, we could eventually have a variant that’s so different from the original strain of COVID-19, that the current vaccines won’t be effective.”

Once again, the implicit claim being made was that if we had a 100% vaccination rate, it would not be possible for an escape variant to evolve.

Another provider, OSF HealthCare, similarly instructed on December 8, 2021, “Get kids vaccinated to help stop the spread of COVID-19 and its variants”.

Reinforcing the perception of children as “mini-bioreactors” (to borrow the language from Simon Rella), hospital pharmacy manager Brian Laird reasoned that “Any time the virus replicates it has the potential to form a new variant. The best way to prevent variants from forming is to limit the number of virus replications. We limit replications by limiting infections. Vaccination is the best way to prevent or limit infections.”

As another example, a headline from Johns Hopkins University on December 21, 2021, declared, “Without Global Vaccinations, Further Variants Ahead”. The article presented two “experts” explaining “how vaccination prevents viral mutation”. The lead paragraph asserted that, “until the majority of the world’s population is vaccinated, we may continue to see new variants.” One of the “experts”, Anna Durbin, director of the Center for Immunization Research, stated, “Until we get the world vaccinated, we’re going to continue to see new variants arise.”

Implicitly, therefore, the central claim of the article was, again, that if 100% of the population was vaccinated, SARS-CoV-2 could not evolve to escape vaccine-induced immunity.

To cite a final example, Munson Healthcare, one of the providers here in Michigan, is presently declaring on its website that it is a “Myth” that COVID-19 vaccines can cause variants, insisting that vaccination “can actually help prevent new variants by slowing the spread of COVID-19 and therefore reducing the opportunity for the virus to mutate.”

Munson is maintaining this position despite the predominance of the Omicron variant, infection with which scientists acknowledge that the COVID-19 vaccines are poorly effective at preventing.

For example, a study published on the preprint server medRxiv on January 28 estimated vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic Omicron infection to be “only 36%” at its peak after the second dose of an mRNA vaccine, which rapidly wanted to “no protection” after six months. A third dose increased vaccine effectiveness to 61%, but we can expect this boost in protection to rapidly wane, too.

A technical briefing on variants of concern from the UK government, for example, estimated mRNA vaccine effectiveness to be “around 65 to 75%” two to four weeks after a booster dose, but this quickly dropped below 50% after just 10 weeks.

Those spouting the nonsense that by getting vaccinated you will be helping to stop SARS-CoV-2 from evolving cannot be unaware that for this outcome to be even theoretically possible would require the vaccines to be capable of inducing durable sterilizing immunity that prevents infection and transmission of the virus, which the COVID-19 vaccines admittedly do not do.

That is to say, every “public health” authority and scientific or medical “expert” attempting to sustain the illusion is a liar (which is not to say that they haven’t convinced themselves of their own propaganda).

How Mass Vaccination Causes Variants

While the “public health” establishment and mainstream media would have us believe that mass vaccination cannot put evolutionary pressure on pathogens to evolve to escape vaccine-induced immunity, the fact that it can and does isn’t controversial in the scientific literature.

A useful illustration of the absence of controversy about this in the literature is the very same modeling study cited by several of the news reports we looked at claiming that a high vaccination rate is the key to stopping SARS-CoV-2 from evolving—the one cited to characterize any unvaccinated person as a “mini-bioreactor”.

While dutifully preaching the public relations message that a higher vaccination rate was required to stop escape variants from emerging, in their paper, the authors contradictorily noted that “a high number of vaccinations creates a selective advantage of the resistant strain over the wildtype strain.”

Curiously describing it as a “counterintuitive” outcome, they reported the prediction from their model that “the highest risk of resistant strain establishment occurs when a large fraction of the population has already been vaccinated but the transmission is not controlled.”

The authors failed to explain why that outcome is not rather intuitive given the fact that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.

Nevertheless, they further commented on how that predicted outcome “may lead to serial rounds of resistant strain evolution with vaccine development playing catch up in the evolutionary arms race against novel strains.”

The emergence and establishment of a vaccine-resistant strain of SARS-CoV-2, they concluded, “appears inevitable.”

Thus, we can see that the major purpose of the propaganda narrative is to indoctrinate people into the belief that unvaccinated people—including those who already have natural immunity—are to blame for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants; the aim is to obfuscate the reality that mass vaccination itself places evolutionary pressure on the virus to mutate into a variant that can escape vaccine-induced immunity.

For a more recent illustration of the lack of controversy about this in the medical literature, take a study published in ACES Infectious Diseases earlier this month. The authors describe the molecular mechanisms that explain the emergence of prevailing variants, showing how “vaccine-escape” mutations could arise “due to natural selection”, including “vaccination-induced evolutionary pressure.”

Acknowledging that there is indeed a problem with the current COVID-19 vaccines, they stressed the importance of their research as a contribution to the development of “new mutation-proof vaccines”.

The term “variant” of concern” (VOC), the authors helpfully noted, was used by the World Health Organization (WHO) to describe “variants that have an increment in the transmissibility and virulence or adversely affect the effectiveness of vaccines”.

That explains why the Omicron variant was immediately labeled a “variant of concern” despite early indications, since confirmed, that this variant generally causes less severe disease. (For further discussion about that, see my article “The Real Reason Why Omicron Is a ‘Variant of Concern’”.)

Given the understood mechanisms by which escape mutants evolve, the authors remarked, “We anticipate that when most of the population is vaccinated, vaccine-resistant mutations will become a more viable mechanism for viral evolutions.”

That should hardly be as a revolutionary observation. It is really just common sense. As agreed by all, natural selection applies to viruses, and viruses adapt through this evolutionary mechanism to overcome immune responses to survive, to be able to continue infecting and replicating inside of the cells of susceptible hosts.

Naturally, mass vaccination will put selective pressure on the pathogen to evolve to escape the vaccine-induced immunity. This is not a function of the proportion of the population vaccinated. It does not cease to be true if 100% of the population has received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, or three doses, or four.

It is a function of the natural selection for pathogens capable of evading immune responses. Even if 100% of the global population were to be fully vaccinated and boosted, SARS-CoV-2 would continue to evolve. Escape variants would continue to emerge precisely because 100% of the population was vaccinated.

To obfuscate that fundamental reality, we are fed such lies as that the vaccines are more effective at preventing infection and transmission than natural immunity.

The likelihood of variants emerging that escape population immunity does not depend on the proportion of people who are unvaccinated but on the proportion of people whose immune systems mount a suboptimal response to the infecting virus.

As noted by John Moore and Paul Offit in an article published in JAMA on January 28, 2021 (emphasis added):

These “escape” mutations typically arise when the virus is put under selective pressure by antibodies that limit but do not eliminate viral replication. Under these conditions, the virus might then find a way to escape this pressure and restore its ability to reproduce more efficiently. The scenario of virus evolution in the face of suboptimal immunity is one reason extending the interval between the first and second dose of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine might be problematic.

Dr. Offit, incidentally, was a member of the vaccine advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that recommended the COVID-19 vaccines receive emergency use authorization.

While he and his coauthor were describing the immunity induced by one vaccine dose as compared to two doses as “suboptimal”, we can extend the logic. Since it is suboptimal immunity that gives rise to variants, and since natural immunity offers better protection against variants compared to the immunity induced by vaccination, we can expect mass vaccination to increase the likelihood that a variant will emerge that escapes the immune responses of fully vaccinated and boosted individuals to a far greater extent than it escapes the immune responses of unvaccinated individuals who have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

It is also theoretically possible that an advantageous mutation is more likely to occur in a vaccinated person than an unvaccinated person whose immune system has never before been challenged by the virus.

This could be true if vaccination results in the phenomenon known in the literature as “original antigenic sin”, which I have often previously discussed, including in my articles “NY Times Finally Acknowledges ‘Original Antigenic Sin’” and “The Real Reason Why Omicron Is a ‘Variant of Concern’”.

I recommend reading those articles to get a better understanding, but, in sum, what can happen is that the relatively inadequate immune responses induced by vaccination are imprinted in the immunologic memory of the individual such that it prejudices each subsequent reexposure to a viral variant to likewise be suboptimal in comparison to the immune responses that would otherwise occur had the person’s immune system instead been primed by infection.

Original antigenic sin can occur with natural infection, too, but this is much less likely because, again, natural immunity includes a much broader array of immune response against the whole infecting virus, whereas the immune responses induced by the vaccines are limited to the genetically modified spike protein of the original Wuhan strain.

Additionally, vaccines are administered into the shoulder muscle, whereas infection occurs via the respiratory tract, inducing mucosal immune responses that are very important for preventing recurrent infection and transmission.

If the immunity from prior infection is more adaptive, capable of essentially updating the memory responses to have greater affinity for the newly infecting variant, and if vaccination ends up impairing the ability of individuals’ immune systems to adapt in this way, then natural immunity must be considered an opportunity cost of vaccination.

It would logically follow that the likelihood of an escape variant emerging is only increased by mass vaccination. It is therefore essential that we consider natural immunity as an opportunity cost of vaccination.

The accumulating evidence indicating the occurrence of original antigenic sin with COVID-19 vaccines is a subject for another article, but for our purposes here, it suffices to observe that the claim that you will be helping to stop the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 by getting a COVID-19 vaccine is unscientific nonsense; it is political propaganda intended to manufacture consent for the policy goal of mass vaccination, in part by aiming to obfuscate the truth that, no matter how high the vaccination rate in the population, these vaccines cannot stop the coronavirus from mutating to escape the suboptimal immunity induced by these pharmaceutical products.