Rhonda Patrick· PhD
Now, people are also conflating the vaccine escaped immunity. That is a completely different thing. That is not something that is relevant to virulence, if you look at the large body of scientific literature covering this topic. I shouldn't say large body. It's actually quite limited. So there's no example of human vaccines causing a more virulent strain. There are examples of vaccine escape. So in other words, variants crop up that are no longer...that can evade the antibodies produced by vaccines. That's a different thing. That isn't something that's more virulent. That's something that's going to affect people that are vaccinated because now they're going to be more likely to be infected, and their vaccine is less effective. That's a very different thing than what we're talking about, which is the evolution, the selective pressure on viruses to transmit, become more transmissible. And that is the selective pressure that exists, not virulence.