New variants

Viruses mutate by their very nature. Some mutate faster than others, but they all mutate. Suggesting that vaccines cause mutations, however, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of viral mutation in the first place.

The opinion piece in the WSJ opens, “The virus appears to be evolving in ways that evade immunity.” While the premise is accurate –that the virus is evolving to evade immunity– the conclusion does not follow that vaccines are causing the virus to mutate. As the article points out, a research paper in Nature states COVID’s “rapid and simultaneous emergence of multiple variants with enormous growth advantages is unprecedented,” meaning that COVID itself mutates rapidly, and has displayed the propensity to do so even before vaccines were ever released.

The virus doesn’t mutate because we are vaccinated, the virus mutates because that is its nature, and those mutations that end up with an advantage are the ones that will be able to infect human cells and replicate there. The successful variants are the ones that develop to evade immunity — and that’s any immunity, not just vaccine-induced immunity.