Glad you asked;
Do vaccines cause virus mutations?
Virologist Friedemann Weber from Justus Liebig University in the western German city of Giessen told DW that it was not the vaccinated who gave rise to new escape mutations and variants, but the unvaccinated: "It was infected people who provided a breeding ground for the new variant and immune escape of the virus."
A glance at
India,
Brazil, and
South Africa shows this, he said. According to Weber, this is where the mutations that are now widespread arose and where the percentage of people vaccinated was very low.
The coronavirus was widespread in all three countries at the time the mutations presumably occurred. This provides ideal conditions for new mutations, said Weber, because the virus uses the weakened immune system in many infected people to adapt better and bypass the immune system.
The claim that vaccines are responsible for mutations is shown to be at least misleading if you look at the countries with high ratios of vaccinated people: If vaccinations massively increased the likelihood of a virus mutating, then new virus mutations would already be appearing in countries like Israel or
the UK, where many people have already received their jabs, Peggy Riese says.
"But this is not the case at all. The virus mutations occur precisely in those countries where there is not yet a high (vaccination) rate, and a large number of people are meeting together within a confined area," she told DW.
The delta variant is spreading rapidly — even in countries with a high vaccination rate. That gives grounds for wild speculation: Did the vaccines make the delta variant possible in the first place? A DW fact check.
www.dw.com