Sure did. That mindset exists in small, but vocal numbers over there.
A thing that concerns me is that there are apparently intelligent, learned people somewhere working very hard to craft solid-sounding ‘scientific’ anti-vax rhetoric. That superficially improved rhetoric gets out there in the Internet wild, and it’s much harder to sweep away than the anti-vax arguments of, say, six months ago.
None of the answers here are convincing.
The truth is, at base there is a potential for COVID to become as deadly as Marek’s disease. Not at the moment, but after mutations.
What made Marek’s disease so deadly was in fact the high vaccination rate. Basically 100%. There was no “punishment” for a virus being deadly (“deadly” here and going forward wrt unvaccinated chickens). Every vaccinated chicken survived the virus. Since every chicken got vaccinated, this deadly virus could live and thrive without any punishment of its host not being able to spread it.
Will COVID evolve into a deadly vaccine? Without an infection, vaccinated persons are basically mutation incubators. The virus replicates, mutates, and vaccinated people spread it while they are infected.
However I dont think it will involve to a deadly virus. In particular, the longer lifetime of humans makes an infection for the vaccinated people inevitable, after which they develop T-Cell immunity, which is much stronger and more effective against a re-infection but also against future mutations (cross immunity). Thus, while the mRNA vaccines is very likely a leaky vaccine, the following infection (which they should survive due to vaccine) should reduce the likelihood of super-deadly Corona-virus. Which was also the original response and, as birds are whispering, will be the Corona-response going forward: Get a shot to survive the initial human-adapted Corona-virus strain, then rely on T-cell immunity going forward.
Of course, if we end up putting bi-annual booster shots in the entire world population until eternity and prevent the ability to build up natural immunity, a Marek’s disease lethality of COVID cannot be excluded anymore.
No, what made Marek’s disease so problematic was that it was a leaky vaccine. It did not reduce spread, nor did it reduce infection rate. It just kept the chickens from getting sick, and a random mutation made it more deadly.
The COVID-19 vaccines are not leaky. They’re not perfect, but no vaccine is. They still do cut transmission rate and infection rate significantly.
Do you know what else does these things? Natural immunity. Your belief that natural means better is completely unfounded. There is no reason to believe that the virus would be more likely to mutate due to natural immunity than vaccine immunity.
However, getting natural immunity takes longer and causes significantly more harm. Not only do more people die or get permanently disabled from it, but that also means the virus has longer to mutate.
The best way to prevent mutations and natural selection is to get rid of a disease as quickly as possible. That’s why it’s imperative that people get vaccinated. Not spread ideas they read on Facebook or heard from their friends.
Medical experts aren’t stupid, and they’ve not suddenly all turned into monsters. They know what they’re doing. We have centuries worth of data on how to stop a disease using a vaccine.
Let us “hammer-time” Joe Rogan’s theories:
This is not true. Viruses only replicate in cells. If there is no “infection”, there is no replication of the virus. If there is no replication, there is no mutation. It has already been shown that the longer a host struggles with an infection, the more likely selective mutations will occur. Mutations arise from a long-term war between the immune system and the virus.
So even if we were vaccinated with a “leaky” vaccine, the vaccinated would not be the mutation incubators. It would mostly be the unvaccinated who are getting sick and going to the hospital at 10X the rate of the vaccinated.
But do we even have a “leaky” vaccine? If you look at the surge vs. vaccination rates county by county, it’s clear that the highly vaccinated counties are experiencing much smaller and shorter surges. Take a look at the NYT map and toggle between case hotspots and vaccination rates. I’ve been doing this almost daily throughout this surge and it’s striking. There was only one major exception, Miami-Dade county, which experienced a significant surge. However, compared to the rest of FL, its surge was much smaller; in the past, Miami was always the leader.
To summarize, vaccination prevents infection and reduces severity (length) of infection. Both of these reduce the chances of creating a variant of concern.
As to T cell immunity, you seem to be suggesting that the vaccinated will only acquire it after being eventually infected. The mRNA vaccine does stimulate T cell immunity. I believe the Jensen and AZ do too. So, no infection required. This is just a recent study; there are many - T-Cells & COVID-19: Penn Study Shows Robust T-Cell Response to Vaccine
Joe Rogan is a scourge. Even the notion that the chicken vaccines were immediately “leaky” is untrue. They only became “leaky” ten years later.
And another thing: vaccines even worked on the chickens Read was studying.
“The [poultry] industry was being hammered by that virus. They made the discovery in the 1960s of a way to vaccinate that saved the industry a fortune,” says Read. “[It] kept many, many chickens from dying horrible deaths. It was absolutely terrific. And then after 10 years, evolution caused some problems which required a different vaccine, which was developed very quickly. And that held for another 10 years. And then the third generation of vaccine is why your chicken nuggets are still cheap. It’s worked now for 30 or 40 years. And it stopped the virus evolution. Almost certainly the reason it stopped the virus evolution is because it stopped transmission. So even in the chicken case, there’s no argument at all why you’d want to be an unvaccinated chicken.”
Even if you go with the “leaky vaccine” theory, there is no reason not to get vaccinated. We know that vaccination prevents serious illness and death. Even if vaccines were to blame for more deadly strains (which is not at all proven, since mutations increase with transmission and we know that vaccination decreases transmission rates) the answer would not be to let people die of the virus in the hopes of “natural immunity”. The answer is to vaccinate as many as possible to make sure that they are protected from the deadly variants. Note that it is still unvaccinated chicken and birds who die from Marek’s. Vaccinate all your chickens and they will be OK.
It really does not matter if one is anti vaccine or pro vaccine. “Leaky” Vaccines are very real and very dangerous.
‘Leaky’ Vaccines Can Produce Stronger Versions of Viruses (healthline.com)
It absolutely does matter. It’s really not a topic that matters for the current pandemic, but if a future pandemic happens to result in the best vaccines being leaky, there is still an easy solution.
Get vaccinated. If no one was anti-vaccine, we’d laugh at future potential leaky viruses.