Thread by @ChrisMasterjohn

The people who think unvaccinated people are “variant factories” are asking us to believe this:

Lack of immunity creates selective pressure to escape immunity.

This is incoherent and indefensible.

I do not believe anyone believes this unless they have no training (even undergrad) in science. I do not believe anyone with any training in science who says this actually believes this.

Matthew Crawford has a good article on this here:

roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/variant-roul…

In sum, the variants of concern didn’t evolve until vaccine trials started and every single one popped up in a location where a vaccine trial was being done.

But please, just *try* to put some basic logic together:

If delta escapes natural and vaccine immunity, then the selective pressure that forced this was obviously natural and vaccine-mediated immunity.

Selective pressure doesn’t come from… nothing.

So sure, people who got COVID and didn’t get vaccinated are probably a part of that selective pressure but the unvaccinated who never got sick yet are not.

So here is the counterpoint.

Note that they agree the selective pressure is from intermediate immunity, but they think the source of intermediate immunity is immunocompromised patients with extended infections.

nature.com/articles/s4157…

This is a paper arguing that unvaccinated people are, in fact variant factories.

(See below)

Referring to the orange line, they write:

“The rate of B cell epitope mutations has sharply increased, starting December 2021, across all 1.8 million genomic sequences (Figure 2c).”

They mean Dec 2020 obviously.

What happened in Dec 2020?

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

They then looked at Mayo Clinic unvaccinated and breakthrough COVID cases.

The study was poorly controlled because the unvaccinated had a lot more predisposing conditions.

However, the unvaccinated had more mutational diversity, while the vaccinated had a higher rate of alpha variant (82.6% vs 60%).

This seems consistent with the vaccine exerting selective pressure: less diversity, more variant of concern.