Thread by @jholbo1

This is off-the-shelf political rhetoric of reaction-as-epidemiology: backfire and jeopardy. Weinstein is thus engineering a more virulent partisan pathogen re: vaccines. 1/

https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1413654756145475585

Here's a simplified write-up, from 2019, of the 'leaky' vaccine leads to virulent virus hypothesis. 2/ healthline.com/health-news/le…

You can see how this is weaponizable. Weinstein is trying to help maneuver us into a position in which future Covid deaths by the unvaxxed can be chalked up to recklessness of medical authorities and the vaxxed (for having superchanged the virus.) 3/

The problem with the narrative is that the risk is purely theoretical. It's not enough that the vaccine be imperfect. It needs to leak in the worst way in order to backfire. Here's a write-up from March about that. 4/ jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

There is no evidence (correct me if I'm wrong) that the actual vaccines are following the Marek track. In the face of a theoretical risk, the thing to do is: get the population vaxxed and watch out. There wouldn't be a way to proceed otherwise proactively. 5/

Weinstein is being careful to equivocate re 'breakthrough cases': 1) the vaccine is imperfect in that it stops illness and spread imperfectly. 2) the vaccine is imperfect in that it stops illness well but stops infection and spread poorly. 6/

In 2) we end up in a bigger petri dish. Living in that petri dish would be bad for the unvaxxed . But (correct me if I'm wrong) there is no evidence whatsoever we are in case 2. Here's the latest I can find. 7/ cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…

The proper way to describe it (which Weinstein - no dummy - is careful not to do) would be: in theory, a leaky vaccine could mitigate against selection against more deadly strains, but not engineer positive selection for deadliness. 8/

A virus that kills quick kills itself quick. But if a killer virus could piggyback on a host population it didn't kill, it could in theory spread from that 'base' to a susceptible segment of that population without killing itself. (Am I missing something?) 9/