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0 pointsdonkarma5y ago0 comments

One worry is that if a vaccine allows for transmission but doesn't generate anything when it comes to effects from the virus, it'll let the virus evolve more dangerous mutations without becoming an issue. This could be potentially dangerous to people who are unvaccinated or if it manages to get past the vaccine. I'm probably pretty in favor of keeping the common cold as it's never killed anyone and helps train the immune system

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lamontcg5y ago· 3 in thread

> One worry is that if a vaccine allows for transmission but doesn't generate anything when it comes to effects from the virus

That isn't a real worry, that is a science-fiction worry.

Viral load, transmissibility and virulence are fairly tightly coupled and they will definitely not come fully uncoupled like that.

fao_5y ago

At the risk of sounding like someone who is posited against the vaccine (I'm not, and I'm looking to receiving my second dose soon), where is your citation on this?

lamontcg5y ago

> By far, the most widely studied trade-off involves transmission and virulence (Anderson and May, 1982; Frank, 1996; Alizon et al. 2009). Transmission and virulence are linked by within-host replication: increasing parasite abundance increases the likelihood of transmission, but also increases the likelihood of host death; mathematically, this assumption can be formalized by making transmission rate β an increasing function of parasite-induced mortality rate ν. Nearly all of the literature we summarize below assumes this trade-off.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/parasitology/article...

Anderson, R. M. and May, R. M. (1982). Coevolution of hosts and parasites. Parasitology 85(Pt 2), 411–426.

Frank, S. A. (1996). Models of parasite virulence. Quarterly Review of Biology 71, 37–78.

Alizon, S., Hurford, A., Mideo, N. and Van Baalen, M. (2009). Virulence evolution and the trade-off hypothesis: history, current state of affairs and the future. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 22, 245–259.

zwaps5y ago

Data from Israel suggests that the vaccine reduces transmissivity by 70 or so per cent. I do not have the link handy, but there is definitely a coupling.

It's not 100%, but it seems to be more than we hoped for. At least for covid, the viral load is reduced and infection depends on that.

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