Coronavirus: the unvaccinated contributed to the variables

Basically, whether (or not) a mutated version of a virus appears is always a matter of statistics: the greater the spread of the virus, the higher the risk of seeing a mutation that looks different enough to be classified as a “variant.” Moreover, the increased spread of the virus increases the risk that this variant will gradually replace others, if it turns out that its mutations make it more transmissible.

Therefore, it is not statistically surprising that during a pandemic, non-vaccinated people contributed more to the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 variants, but this remains to be proven.

This is what 11 researchers from China and Australia came up with. their researchpublished March 31 in the journal Nature Communicationsbased on decoding the genes of 2,820 samples of the virus collected from the lungs of several patients between June 2020 and September 2022. The authors looked for relationships between the emergence of different strains of the virus and the conditions in which infection occurred in different pandemic waves or vaccination campaigns.

At the end they write, “In unvaccinated individuals, variables of concern Alpha, Delta and Omicron had more “genetic diversity”. Or if we look at the problem from the other side: vaccination did not enhance the ability of the virus to acquire new mutations.

These numbers reinforce observations made throughout 2022: Comparatively speaking, the unvaccinated were systematically at greater risk of severe cases of COVID Which leads to hospitalizationEven more at risk of dying from it.