Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: August 10, 2021 03:06AM
This is largely wrong.
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> There are a handful of vaccines, so not much
> diversity.
The Covid vaccines exhibit more diversity than the vaccines against polio, smallpox, MMR, tuberculosis, and any number of other diseases.
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> Like any species, the virus has a hive
> mind, or morphic field, that learns as it goes.
This is woo, not reality.
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> The hundreds of millions of hosts with the same
> vaccine offers ideal training conditions for the
> virus.
False. What offers ideal conditions is hundreds of millions, or billions, of people without any vaccinations. That is where the mutation rates are highest and the variants capable of evading vaccines most likely to evolve, not through morphic nonsense but through random errors in replication.
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> With those numbers, the virus is likely to
> find many successful mutations. The problem
> isn’t just that the mutations survive, it’s
> that all mutations everywhere are quicker to adopt
> that survival strategy.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of virology. Vaccinated individuals have vastly lighter viral loads and hence much lower rates of mutation. Your argument about numbers is therefore misplaced: mutations occur where the virus is least inhibited, not most.
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> This kind of low diversity, high volume mass
> vaccination has never been tried before.
See the list of diseases above. All of those were suppressed and are managed through what you call "low diversity, high volume" vaccinations--more so, in fact, than COVID, for which there are several vaccines.
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> We’re
> going on theory, minus any theory of the Akash.
Akash?
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> Pure survival pressure is going to produce a
> vaccine race like the regular flu.
Again, misunderstanding. What renders influenza a moving target is its type: a particularly unstable virus given to much faster mutation. That's what determines whether a disease requires constant boosters.
COVID is a rapidly evolving virus too. Any chance of preventing its transformation into an endemic illness therefore lies in the urgent and comprehensive use of effective vaccines to shrink the pool in which mutations occur.
In my view it's probably too late given that half the world has no vaccines and hence represents a massive petri dish in which mutations can occur. But that is a function of the virus's nature, not of "low diversity, high volume" vaccines.
Indeed, the logical implication of your theory is that no vaccine at all is the right way to go--and that is demonstrably false.
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> Countries with a 100% vaccination rate aren’t
> doing much better than us because it’s not a
> silver bullet.
That is utterly incorrect. The higher the vaccination rate, the smaller the COVID problem. And that will remain the case until the enormous pools of the unvaccinated spawn variants that can circumvent the existing vaccines.
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> The old tried and true methods of
> 1918 are still needed.
That's both temporally and factually specious. Variolation, the use of attenuated material to induce immunity, was practiced in China a thousand years ago; and in the Islamic world centuries ago. In the West smallpox was banished that way starting in the 19th century, and Pasteur developed the rabies vaccine in 1885. So vaccines are far older than 1918.
And factually, "the tried and true methods" were and remain vaccines. Whether they work depends on 1) the stability of the virus, and 2) the number of hosts in which the virus can mutate. Your implied solution would blow the lid off the latter and rob the world of any chance of preventing COVID's becoming endemic.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/10/2021 03:12AM by Lot's Wife.