Vaccination alone will not stop the rise of new variants and, in fact, could fuel the development of strains that defy protection, the researchers have warned.
They said people should wear masks and take other steps to prevent it from spreading until almost everyone in a population is vaccinated.
Their findings, published in Nature Scientific Reports, support an unpopular decision by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that even fully vaccinated people revert to wearing masks in areas of sustained or high transmission.
According to CNN, “We found that a fast rate of vaccination decreases the probability of emergence of a resistant strain,” the team wrote.
“Counterintuitively, when a relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions happened at a time when most individuals of the population have already been vaccinated, the probability of emergence of a resistant strain was greatly increased,” they added.
“Our results suggest that policymakers and individuals should consider maintaining non-pharmaceutical interventions and transmission-reducing behaviors throughout the entire vaccination period.”
Simon Rella of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria worked on the study and told reporters, “When most people are vaccinated, the vaccine-resistant strain has an advantage over the original strain,”
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