The Evolutionary Legacy of Mass Covid-19 Vaccination

Jul 01, 2026

Cross-posted by Voice for Science and Solidarity by Geert Vanden Bossche

"An honest net-mortality calculus would require: Direct COVID deaths averted (if any — and this number shrinks with each immune-evasive variant) Direct vaccine deaths (VAERS, insurance data, excess mortality signals — systematically undercounted but clearly non-zero) Vaccine-induced morbidity that later contributed to mortality (myocarditis → heart failure years later, immune dysregulation → cancer, etc.) Evolutionary harm — did mass vaccination with non-sterilizing vaccines accelerate immune escape and prolong the pandemic? Behavioral harm — did the belief in vaccine protection lead to riskier behavior and more transmission? Opportunity cost — what treatments and strategies were suppressed or defunded because "the vaccine will end this"? Nobody has done this accounting honestly. "

- Steve Kirsch

I recently came through the following preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.11.731720v1.
I am not convinced that the data presented in this preprint will deliver the new insights into the life cycle and global evolution of SARS-CoV-2 (SC-2) that the authors appear to anticipate. My concern is that the study interprets viral evolution largely through a conventional virological lens while underestimating the profound impact that population-level immune dynamics have had on viral adaptation in highly COVID-19 (C-19)-vaccinated populations.

I am therefore trying to reconstruct the chain of evolutionary events as I see it, so that the individual pieces of the puzzle can be understood as parts of a coherent evolutionary process:

Mass C-19 vaccination during ongoing viral circulation created strong population-level immune pressure on transmissible SC-2 variants.
This pressure favored the emergence and selection of increasingly infectious immune escape variants.
These variants generated repeated vaccine-breakthrough infections (VBTIs).
Repeated VBTIs progressively reinforced immune refocusing toward increasingly obsolete viral targets.
Immune refocusing contributed to increasingly dysfunctional and less effective antiviral adaptive immune responses.
Such immune dysfunction created favorable conditions for prolonged and chronic SC-2 infections in susceptible individuals (‘long Covid’).
Prolonged infections provided an ideal environment for accelerated intra-host viral evolution and the emergence of highly mutated saltation variants under sustained immune pressure.
Following their emergence, these saltation variants were subjected to population-level selection in highly C-19-vaccinated populations.
However, the transmissibility gains conferred by successive immune escape mutations have become increasingly marginal, resulting in the long-term co-circulation of only a limited number variant families that have converged on similar adaptive solutions (i.e., XFG, NB.1.8.1 and BA.3.2).
This prolonged co-circulation under narrowing evolutionary constraints is now creating the conditions for a major evolutionary phase transition, which I have referred to as Hi-Vi-Cron.

In my view, the current evolutionary landscape is therefore not one of stable endemicity, but of metastability. The virus continues to adapt, yet increasingly within a restricted evolutionary corridor in which additional immune escape yields diminishing returns. Such systems do not typically evolve through endless fine-tuning. When incremental adaptive pathways become exhausted, evolutionary systems tend to reorganize — sometimes abruptly and dramatically.

My conclusion remains that mass vaccination with non-sterilizing C-19 vaccines during the circulation of increasingly transmissible SC-2 variants has laid the groundwork for a prolonged immune escape pandemic and may ultimately favor the emergence of a fundamentally different viral phenotype capable of triggering a major evolutionary phase transition in highly C-19-vaccinated populations.