Answering COVID19 Conspiratards

 

There's a lot to unpack here. "My doctor... vaccinated creates more ammo for the virus to grow stronger and more resistant..." I do admire that his doctor sounds a lot like the anti-vaxx doctors on the internet, but there is much to unpack.

Sometimes I don't grasp the past that well, but I'm pretty sure before COVID19 we had vaccines. I think we had a lot of them. Small pox, measles, yearly influenza, etc. The data shows that we aren't being overwhelmed with super measles or seasonal super influenza that is worse and worse each year. It's not to say that it couldn't happen, but with the data we currently possess on vaccines - it isn't happening.

Plus, if this were a problem - it isn't a vaccine problem. It would be an immunity problem. Let's just assume we went "all natural" and much of the world was infected with COVID19. Well, most of the world would gain the immune response t-cells and antibodies to fight future infections. At this point, is the virus suddenly just going to die off or will it "grow stronger and more resistant"?

I do appreciate that people almost put a volitional component into things to help explain some evolutionary process. We try to stop the virus and bam the virus fights back with a big blow.  If only them fighting words were real.

Unpacking further, what does it mean to be "stronger"? What does it mean to be "more resistant"?

Does stronger mean it leads to more serious illness & death? Does stronger mean it is more infectious? Does it mean more infectious and deadly?

From an evolutionary perspective (attaches the volitional ego to the virus), it doesn't have to lead to more serious illness and death. In fact, it makes a lot of sense to become less deadly. People dropping like flies isn't exactly a good way for the virus to spread around. Nor is crippling them to an ICU bed  very good for the long term evolutionary survival. The more defanged variant is a probable outcome precisely because people will get sick, have symptoms and go around spreading it.

Again, evolution and the virus both don't have volitional characteristics. There isn't a preordained evolutional direction, but the notion that it must lead to a "stronger" variant isn't true. Based on other infectious diseases it stays relatively in the same territory of "strength" or becomes something more defanged - which leads to easier spread.

"More resistant" is an interesting description. More resistant to what exactly? It's not like there is some thing in the virus that is resistant. It's not a property of the virus. Before vaccines and a previous infection, you had no resistance to the virus except a baseline immune response that fights all infections the same way. After vaccines and/or infection, you have resistance to the virus - if we're going to use the term "resistance". The virus will mutate and change over time and evolutionarily the variants that spread best will spread (it's tautological). If the immune response starts to wane, we make new vaccines tailored to prevalent variant - just like the yearly influenza vaccine.

This isn't ground breaking stuff.

There is more that I could go into on this comment, but that one sentence I felt was worth the discussion. We don't have to go into the vaccines are only good for 6 months, as if Israel's coco for coco puffs focus on cases, cases, cases is the only thing that matters - neglecting the stellar performance of what the vaccine was meant to do - separate serious disease, hospitalization and death from a case. Israel is more of an example of politicians treating a runny nose case as equal to a ICU case - which is an example of stupid.

Well, if you were around during this whole COVID thing, you would have known that people were living their life under restrictions. I wasn't allowed to go to visit someone outside my household the entire time (unless it was outside). People were working from home, social distancing, etc. Today, you are allowed to do what you want. I was at a party at someone's house yesterday - as an example. Include in the fact that delta is far more contagious you have more hospitalizations.

But the fact is clear, the hospital and ICU are filled up with the unvaccinated - who make up a minority portion of people - and a tiny portion of those 65+.

No one is asking the 'simple' questions because we have the 'simple' data available.