Do the Covid-19 vaccines make mutated variants more likely?

mRNA vaccines are subunit vaccines, so it easier for a virus to mutate and escape its immunity. Last year, many scientists believed Covid-19 had a low mutation rate, so the variants that have formed this year surprised them.

Scientists knew that some breakthrough cases would happen, but none predicted the big surge that America is experiencing right now. Last summer, when no one was vaccinated, the number of new daily cases peaked 80,000 (July 24th, 2020), but now the US, with over half its population fully vaccinated, is averaging twice that daily. However, on December 21st, 2020, the medical website Thailandmedical.news made the following prediction:

Thailand Medical News Predicts that by the time the Third Wave emerges in around June ie roughly about 5 to 6 months after the mass vaccination programmes, we will witness a new level in the COVID-19 pandemic…

The company Rational Vaccine pointed out on Dec. 8th, 2020 that in the past only live-attenuated vaccines have been effective at stopping RNA viral pandemics:

Subunit vaccines frequently have limitations, especially against more complex pathogens… For example, mutant viruses may escape anti-protein targeted immune responses, and may not induce long-term memory immune responses that protect against infection over a long period of time. Also, the possibility exists that weak antibody responses may enhance susceptibility to infection instead of preventing it, as is the case with Dengue viral infections.

While mainstream outlets keep shouting the refrain “the vaccines still protects against hospitalization and death”, there is good scientific reasons to be very concerned about vaccines that allow transmissions, especially for RNA viruses. A peer-reviewed scientific article from 2015 about “leaky vaccines” stated:

When vaccines prevent transmission, as is the case for nearly all vaccines used in humans, this type of evolution towards increased virulence is blocked. But when vaccines leak, allowing at least some pathogen transmission, they could create the ecological conditions that would allow hot strains to emerge and persist. This theory proved highly controversial when it was first proposed over a decade ago, but here we report experiments with Marek’s disease virus in poultry that show that modern commercial leaky vaccines can have precisely this effect: they allow the onward transmission of strains otherwise too lethal to persist.

Furthermore, Covid-19 has a mechanism for selecting advantageous mutations:

SARS-CoV-2 is a quasispecies with high sequence diversity and dynamics, even within single patients.” [1] … “Quasispecies are clouds of genotypes that appear in a population at mutation–selection balance… Many RNA viruses appear to generate high levels of genetic variation that may enhance the evolution of drug resistance and immune escape. [2]

A January, 2021 peer-reviewed study concluded:

Almost one-third of SARS-CoV-2 quasispecies diversity in Victoria was shared between patients, suggesting host-to-host transmission… Our results suggest that although transmission may be limited, this process does not seem to be random…This nonrandom transmission of quasispecies diversity has been observed in other RNA viruses [74,75], and some of these variants could be expected to have played a role in the response of the virus to the immune system.

Researcher Geert Von Bosche, provides an in-depth explanation for how vaccination with imperfect vaccines can actually drive up the number of infections, and almost certainly will lead to more virulent strains evolving, writing on March 30th, 2021:

As ongoing mass vaccination campaigns are shifting the ‘reservoir’ of viral transmission to asymptomatically infected subjects (whether vaccinated or not), the likelihood for unvaccinated, previously asymptomatically infected subjects to experience re-infection with Sars-CoV-2 while being endowed with suboptimal and short-lived anti-S Abs substantially increases.

Mass vaccination of the general population could turn out to be just like all of Trump’s other promises — sounded good enough on the surface, but harmful and dangerous in the long-run.