Study: Vaccines Making Pathogens More Dangerous.

IMMUNOLOGY

Vaccines Are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve

Just as antibiotics breed resistance in bacteria, vaccines can incite changes that enable diseases to escape their control. Researchers are working to head off the evolution of new threats.
Recent research suggests, however, that some pathogen populations are adapting in ways that help them survive in a vaccinated world, and that these changes come about in a variety of ways. Just as the mammal population exploded after dinosaurs went extinct because a big niche opened up for them, some microbes have swept in to take the place of competitors eliminated by vaccines.
Immunization is also making once-rare or nonexistent genetic variants of pathogens more prevalent, presumably because vaccine-primed antibodies can’t as easily recognize and attack shape-shifters that look different from vaccine strains. And vaccines being developed against some of the world’s wilier pathogens — malaria, HIV, anthrax — are based on strategies that could, according to evolutionary models and lab experiments, encourage pathogens to become even more dangerous.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathogens-to-evolve-20180510/