Joe Rogan’s public misrepresentation of a 2015 vaccine study has gone viral. His misunderstanding of the study leads Rogan to wrongly conclude that vaccinating people against COVID-19 will increase the chances of some hyper-virulent mutation. You can watch the video below. But before you do, the lead scientist and author of the study who spent 10 years conducting this research has something to say. Because he’s horrified.
“Joe Rogan is getting this completely wrong,” says Andrew Read, professor of biology and entomology at Pennsylvania State. “He's taking very careful work about evolutionary scenarios of the future, and from that, erroneously concluding that people should not be vaccinated now.”
Rogan quotes a line from the paper’s abstract out of context: “Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population.”
Read responds: “We're talking a very different virus and very different vaccines. The details in biology really matter a lot. The chicken vaccines we worked with, the first-generation vaccine, definitely reduced disease, severity and death.” But unlike the COVID mRNA vaccines, the chicken vaccine “didn't stop transmission at all.” And this is one of the key differences between what was being studied in Read’s paper and our current situation with the global pandemic. “Those [vaccinated] chickens just kept churning out the virus for weeks and weeks and weeks.” Again, this is a key difference. “It’s a very different virus from SARS-2. A key issue here is transmissibility.”
More transmission increases the likelihood of mutation. Thankfully, COVID-19 Vaccines reduce transmission and reduce opportunity for mutation.
“Think about what's happening with evolution,” offers Read. “Mutations can occur anytime the [virus] replicates. So the more replication, the more variants are generated. At the moment, the vast majority of the replication is happening in unvaccinated people. You can tell that because the majority of cases in the hospital are unvaccinated individuals. That is where the evolutionary action is happening at the moment.”
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