Glad your friend who got sick is doing okay now @Dollar Slice.
I had a weird experience volunteering at the rescue mission recently. Was sitting there filling little cups with sauce when another volunteer joined me and immediately launched into a weird, unprompted, conspiracy-filled monologue about how the reason there are so many variants is that too many people are vaccinated and that "the inventor" or the vaccines said this was true in some article she read. Obviously this is completely the opposite of how virus evolution works: less spread of a virus means less replication and thus less rapid evolution of new variants. Not to mention that there isn't any single person who invented these vaccines, so her source is totally faulty. Anyway, she certainly seemed confident and proudly proclaimed that she wouldn't be getting a booster. The only thing I can think of that triggered her to launch into lecturing me is that the people manning the volunteer door at the mission insisted she wear a mask in their kitchen and gave her one since she didn't bring one.
Then she complained that the blood bank wouldn't let her give a donation because her temp was measured at 101! I moved away from her as soon as I could.
"The" inventor is likely Robert Malone, who has claimed this label since at least 2010. Malone was a researcher at the Salk Institute involved with mRNA vaccine research but it appears most people wouldn't say that he was
the inventor (or that anyone can be deemed as the sole inventor). Apparently, Malone claims that his central role in mRNA vaccine development was obfuscated and that others have stolen much of the glory. For some more context,
here is a 1989 paper by Malone as lead author and
here is a 1990 paper with Malone as second author. But of course, his claim on this matter is not relevant to the question of vaccine escape risk.
The thinking behind vaccine-induced escape variants is based on the observation that many of the vaccines train the immune system on just the spike protein. Such narrow targeting gives the virus a different evolutionary landscape than natural infection, which would induce immune response against many or all of the viral proteins. The reason this matters for covid vaccines and not for other narrowly targeted vaccines is that covid is in wide circulation in the population. Compared to a rare disease, vaccinating against covid will often result in an exposure which will provide opportunities for natural selection to find variants that are specifically capable of circumventing the vaccine-induced immunity. If such an outcome is unlikely but a billion people end up being exposed to covid following vaccination, the odds of an escape variant occurring
somewhere are higher than if baseline rates of infection were much lower. But comparing natural to vaccine-induced immunity would require detailed analysis of immunological data in the vaccinated and in convalescents and I don't think it's clear at this point which type of immunity is more- or less-favorable to the emergence of variants when taking all factors into consideration, including the total number of viral copies made in each scenario.
As an example, under a certain set of assumptions,
this paper finds that escape risk is highest for an intermediate level of population vaccination.
