Friday, August 06, 2021

Malone and Navarro: Biden Admin's Misguided and Deadly Vaccine Strategy

I don't know enough to even know whether there's an obvious response to this, but it sounds, prima facie, extremely reasonable to me. There're a lot of interesting arguments in there, but this is the most interesting:

   The most important reason why a universal vaccination strategy is imprudent tracks to the collective risk associated with how the virus responds when replicating in vaccinated individuals. Here, basic virology and evolutionary genetics tell us the goal of any virus is to infect and replicate in as many people as possible. A virus can’t efficiently spread if, like with Ebola, it quickly kills its hosts.
   The clear historical tendency for viruses crossing over from one species to another is to evolve in a way that makes them both more infectious and less pathogenic over time. However, a universal vaccination policy deployed in the middle of a pandemic can turn this normal Darwinian taming process into a dangerous vaccine arms race.
   The essence of this arms race is this: The more people you vaccinate, the greater the number of vaccine-resistant mutations you are likely to get, the less durable the vaccines will become, ever more powerful vaccines will have to be developed, and individuals will be exposed to more and more risk.
   Science tells us here that today’s vaccines, which use novel gene therapy technologies, generate powerful antigens that direct the immune system to attack specific components of the virus. Thus, when the virus infects a person with a “leaky” vaccination, the viral progeny will be selected to escape or resist the effects of the vaccine.
   If the entire population has been trained via a universal vaccination strategy to have the same basic immune response, then once a viral escape mutant is selected, it will rapidly spread through the entire population – whether vaccinated or not.
   A far more optimal strategy is to vaccinate only the most vulnerable. This will limit the amount of vaccine-resistant mutations and thereby slow, if not halt, the current vaccine arms race.

They also sort of whiz by the vicinity of an argument I'd like to hear a response to: if you think that the Emergency Use Authorization is sufficient to give us practical certainty that the vaccines are safe, shouldn't you be committed to basically changing the whole system of FDA approval so that what we now call EUAs become the standard, normal type of authorization? That is: if EUAs are good enough to make vax "hesitancy" irrational--irrational enough to warrant anger and ridicule--why do we use longer, slower, more expensive approval processes at all? OTOH, if EUAs aren't good enough to be relied on as the ordinary standard, on what grounds do progressives declare that vax hesitancy is irrational? Not to mention: that you shouldn't be allowed in the grocery store without them...not to mention that they should be legally mandated? (!!!)

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