Thread by @RealSteveCox

Covid-19 Anti-Vaxxer Education Thread:
There is one major misconception at the root of most anti-vax rhetoric I see and hear online and in real life: The idea that viruses work like bacteria. We’re going to tackle this one now.
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If I don’t provide a link, it’s due to Twitter character count, so please just use your browser’s search engine.
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Try to engage anti-vaxxers online and you’ll quickly be inundated with misleading headlines from irresponsible media outlets like these. Anti-vaxxers are notorious at this point for only reading the headlines.
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“So what’s the point in being vaccinated if vaccinated still catch/spread the virus just like unvaccinated people, especially since the vaccines will lead to vaccine-resistant virus strains?”
Questions like these are based on ignorance, so I’ll attempt to explain the errors.
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Bacteria and Viruses aren’t the same. Bacteria are living organisms that can reproduce independent of a host organism. Viruses are not. Viruses require hosts to reproduce, and mutations occur *only* during reproduction.
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Viral mutations are completely random. They’re simply an error in the virus’ code. Those errors occur at certain rates, depending on the virus/variant. Covid, thankfully, actually has a low mutation rate about 20 times slower than the flu.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33064680/
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This is why vaccines can be—and actually *are*—so effective against Covid. Because Covid doesn’t mutate very fast. And most mutations/variants are unsuccessful. Similar to the mechanisms involved in Evolution by Natural Selection…
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If the mutation doesn’t help the virus infect more people, that strain dies out. This natural selection is what allows strains like Delta to take over.
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But Covid’s also much more contagious than the flu—especially Delta—so it has far more *opportunities* to mutate (in a host). And because viral mutation is completely random (unlike antibiotic-resistant bacteria), the more hosts it infects, the more likely variants become.
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It’s also important to note the impact on environmental viral load and exposure time on infection-likelihood. If you are swimming in a sea of airborne Covid, your risk of contracting the virus goes up significantly, and continue going up the longer you’re exposed.
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The Delta variant’s major mutation—which occurred in India before vaccines were available, meaning it occurred in an unvaccinated population—is how fast it reproduces. It reproduces about twice as quickly as previous variants.
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That reproduction rate leads to quicker, heavier, more deadly infections because even healthy immune systems often can’t keep up. This is also why it’s killing children/young adults at a much higher rate, and why vaccinated people are at higher risk of infection.
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And the Delta variant is the dominant strain almost everywhere for this exact same reason as well, because it reproduces so fast it has almost completely pushed the original Covid strains out.
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This is one headline being shared by anti-vaxxers. Notice the details from the study it references. The study starts at “people infected with Covid”. So it selects vaccinated populations based on their being infected *already*.
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This is a key point because the same study acknowledges that vaccinated people are significantly less likely to catch Covid *and* even if they do catch it, they’re contagious for a much shorter time.
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It’s also based on *household* contacts only—which means prolonged periods of breathing virus into an enclosed environment without masks, social distancing, or other non-pharmacological measures in place.
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If you control for a whole population, instead of just those with Covid, you quickly find that the unvaccinated account for almost all *cases*, much less hospitalizations and deaths. But this data depends on local govt policies like testing protocols, so data is inconsistent.
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But there’s no reason to believe outliers (like Israel, which has many contributing factors not shared elsewhere that we won’t get into here because it’s a distraction and I don’t have the time) are anything more than outliers.
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And now to the final point for this thread regarding the risk of vaccinated people creating vaccine-resistant strains:
That’s not what the science actually says. Again, this is that study. Notice the conclusion?
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Here’s why:
To reiterate, vaccines can only mutate inside a host, so the more hosts, the more *random* mutations. The more random mutations, the higher likelihood of new strains taking over, like Delta. The vaccines do prevent infection the overwhelming majority of the time.
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This study involves frontline healthcare workers—people who are swimming in a sea of virus for extended periods of time—and even under those circumstances, the vaccines prevented infection at a rate of 66%, which is higher than the original *Polio* vaccine’s efficacy!
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The polio vaccine was successful in preventing infection only about 60% of the time, and we eradicated polio!
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But for the rest of us, as long as we practice social distancing, masking, etc, the vaccines will prevent the overwhelming majority of spread both to vaccinated people *and* unvaccinated people (such as small children).
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And *that* means a major reduction in *mutations*. Which is why the study often cited by anti-vaxxers about “vaccine-resistant strains” concludes we need *more* people vaccinated!
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We need more people vaccinated to prevent vaccine-resistant strains from showing up because the vaccine-resistant strain will more than likely come from an *unvaccinated* population. Just like Delta did (India, October 2020).
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Here’s how that would work in a population with, say, 1/3 (33.3%) of people unvaccinated:
Virus easily jumps from one unprotected host to another, and every reproduction inside that host increases odds of a successful mutation.
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Then, randomly, one mutation occurs that happens to resist vaccines (in ways we can’t predict, because it’s *random*). Then, all that vaccine-resistant variant has to do is transfer from one unvaccinated person to one vaccinated person (say, at a grocery store).
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Since it resists vaccines, infection is easy, and then that person goes home to their (probably vaccinated) family, who catch the new strain, then they go to work/school, and off it goes!
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And then we’ll have to lock everything completely down again while new vaccines are developed and tested for the new strain, and we start this whole, awful process over again.
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It’s *unvaccinated* populations *intermingling with* vaccinated populations that could create a vaccine-resistant strain of Covid. That’s the *actual* science. Which is why I’ve said in the past that people who *choose* to be unvaccinated are a threat to my family. And yours.
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And, frankly at this point, this is why anti-vaxxers and anti-vax disinformation are a threat to society as a whole. Which is why I have a zero-tolerance policy for them.
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Their arguments are (often willfully) ignorant and they don’t actually care about the science unless they can manipulate it to present a conclusion they want it to present.

We can end this virus if everyone who can vaccinate *does*.
#GetVaccinated
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Feel free to copy-paste/screen-grab this thread if people want to read it and I’ve blocked them for being willfully ignorant anti-vaxxers. Just don’t be surprised when it has no effect.
#Fin
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