Unvaccinated people become 'variant factories,' warns expert
WASHINGTON - People who have not been vaccinated against Covid-19 not only risk their own health but are "variant factories," an infectious disease expert told CNN.
"Unvaccinated people are potential variant factories," Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre said.
"The more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply," he added.
Variants evolve in the body of a person who is infected with the coronavirus.
"When it does, it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more serious down the road," Schaffner said.
Viruses, including the coronavirus that causes
Covid-19, endure mutations, and while some mutations may harm the virus, others could help it. For example, a mutation could help a virus be more transmissible.
When the virus spreads to another person, the mutation will replicate and also spread, and if it's successful and continues to spread, it
becomes a variant.
Unvaccinated people provide the opportunity for the mutation to continue to replicate, CNN reported.
"As mutations come up in viruses, the ones that persist are the ones that make it easier for the virus to spread in the population," Andrew Pekosz, a microbiologist and immunologist at the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNN.
"Every time the viruses changes, that gives the virus a different platform to add more mutations. Now we have viruses that spread more efficiently."
Essentially if a virus can't spread, it can't mutate.
There are already several variants of the coronavirus, including four called "variants of concern" by the World Health Organisation,
These four include Alpha, first discovered in the UK, Beta, first discovered in South Africa, Gamma, first discovered in Brazil, and Delta, first discovered in India, pose risks because they are either more transmissible, cause worse disease, or can evade immune protection.