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July 22, 2021
New variants will continue to emerge if segments of the population persist in refusing vaccination. That's because the more opportunities that SARS-CoV-2 has to circulate, the more infectious it can become. In fact, the World Health Organization recently cautioned that more contagious variants are "currently winning the race against vaccines."
"Viruses naturally experience frequent changes or mutations in their genetic code, and while most of these changes are inconsequential, occasionally one may arise that enhances the ability of a virus to replicate, transmit or evade our immune systems," explained Andrew Read, director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State. "Being more successful, such viruses tend to out-compete other viruses and spread through the human population. This is what happened in the United States with the Delta variant."
A mutation could also make a virus more dangerous, added Read. Research suggests that some of the new variants cause more severe disease than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Why does this matter?
"Because there are millions of children under age 12 who are not yet able to get vaccinated," said Read, "and because there are many people who are unable to get vaccinated for health reasons, such as having an autoimmune disease."
The death rate from COVID-19 in the United States is on the rise for the first time in many months, with 99% of deaths occurring among the unvaccinated, according to the CDC.
"You may not be worried about your own health," Read said, "but if you choose to forgo vaccination, you are putting yourself and others at risk. People who become severely sick clog our hospitals, cause misery for their families and may trigger restrictions that impact our economy and our well-being. The best way to stop new variants from arising is to stop SARS-CoV-2, and vaccines are the most effective way to do that."
Penn State students, faculty and staff are strongly encouraged to get the COVID-19 vaccine and should upload their vaccination records as soon as possible. With this information, University officials will be able to better assess vaccination rates across Penn State and plan for the fall activities that we all love. It's not too late to get a vaccine. Find a location near you. The latest vaccination information is available on Penn State's virus information website.

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• First, the research and conclusion makes sense, and is not something I had considered previously. Start with the understanding that viruses typically mutate to be more contagious and less virulent because in normal society those are the characteristics that give a virus the greatest chance at reproducing. The more contagious part makes perfect sense on why it is an evolutionary benefit. The less virulent part is because a virus that is too virulent tends to either immobilize the host, reducing the number of contacts and chances to spread, or by killing the host too quickly, again minimizing the chances to spread. If however, you had a scenario where a vaccine greatly reduced the damaging effects of the virus without really impacting its transmission rate, you would be removing a lot of the evolutionary pressure to select against more virulent strains, which would increase the odds of allowing a more virulent strain to survive which would suck for unvaccinated.
• Second, this isn't cause to panic because these vaccines do in fact reduce transmission and virus mutation is a essentially a random game of chance. Every new host has some % odds of having a mutation in their version of the virus. These mutations are essentially random changes in the genetic code so every virus version that gets a a mutation has some % odds of that mutation making a meaningful impact in the way the virus behaves. Then finally, for every meaningful impact, there is some % odds that the change in behavior is actually competitively beneficial to that version's chance of reproduction, I'll call this a significant mutation. Because of the way these percentages stack, if you can reduce the overall number of virus transmissions, you reduce the chances of one of these significant mutations of actually occurring in any fixed time period, making the scenario in the first bullet point less likely from actually occurring.

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"Does their work have wider implications? It only applies to generally lethal infections, transmission of which would normally be limited by death of all infected animals."

-Dr. Michael Skinner

"it is important not to claim from this example in chickens that this is a problem with vaccines in humans. There is strong evidence that widely used human vaccines are not producing any such effect."

-Professor Adrian Hill

"It's important not to interpret this study as an argument against vaccination of our children against flu or any other disease. The standard vaccines that are in current use are safe and effective, and not prone to cause the emergence of more dangerous strains of viruses. Vaccines are amongst the safest and most cost-effective measures that we have to improve public health and protect from disease and it is vital that we achieve high vaccination rates to prevent the return of the many and terrible diseases that they prevent."

-Professor Peter Openshaw

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Before COVID came along, the two of us compared vaccines that keep working with vaccines that have been undermined by pathogen evolution.

It turns out that truly evolution-proof vaccines have three features. First, they are highly effective at suppressing viral replication. This stops further transmission. No replication, no transmission, no evolution.

Second, evolution-proof vaccines induce immune responses that attack several different parts of the microbe at the same time. It is easy for a single part of the virus to mutate and escape being targeted. But if many sites are attacked at once, immune escape requires many separate escape mutations to occur simultaneously, which is almost impossible. This has already been shown in the laboratory for SARS-CoV-2. There the virus rapidly evolved resistance to antibodies targeting a single site, but struggled to evolve resistance to a cocktail of antibodies each targeting multiple different sites.

Third, evolution-proof vaccines protect against all circulating strains, so that no others can fill the vacuum when competitors are removed.

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