- Unvaccinated people can be a driving force for new variants, an infectious disease expert told CNN.
- "Unvaccinated people are potential variant factories," infectious disease expert Dr. William Schaffner said.
- Mutations that replicate can become variants and unvaccinated hosts more easily allow for that.
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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 Center, told CNN.
"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."