"The creation of a vaccine for any new virus could also cause additional mutations.

“Let’s explain this concept a little further. Any virus will keep trying to change, so it can continue to spread. With all vaccines, the more quickly people get vaccinated the better. The slower vaccination happens, the higher the chance of having mutations in the virus and the appearance of more variants. And, as we are seeing with the delta variant, the more the virus can spread in the community.""

Isn't that just completely wrong? Saying that the vaccine "caused" that mutation when it was actually the lack of the vaccine that caused it?

Here's another one, a friggin NPR article (https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965703047/vaccines-could-driv...). It says "At the same time, vaccines can contribute to virus mutations" while the article itself is really only describing that it's the lack of vaccines that yield more time/opportunity for the virus to mutate. Why do people keep saying the virus causes the mutations? It's completely irresponsible.

First, the "virus" in this sentence means "all the trillions of individual virions currently in our environment, including the trillions currently in living cells. This does not mean that individual virions are changing in response to any stimulus or lack thereof. What they are saying is that as those trillions beget many trillions more, there will be many random mutations. Most of those mutations will result in failure. Some will end up as successful as their antecedent. A tiny few will end up with mutations that make them more successful in the current environment. So the mutations happen regardless of anything we do or don't do.

But as we take more countermeasures, it becomes harder for the baseline virions to be successful (because the vaccines work, distancing works, etc.). Any mutations that are only as successful as baseline are going to have trouble spreading. So by default what we will see is more of the mutations that result in things like easier transmission. Because they are better suited to the current environment where people are taking countermeasures. And because baseline is not as successful, the proportion of the new variants will increase over time.

Putting this together, if there's no selection pressure, mutations don't confer any advantage and they will tend to disappear from the population. So through that lens, the new variants wouldn't necessarily have gained a foothold if people weren't using countermeasures. That's not specifically the vaccines, though. Delta is apparently more transmissible generally, and that could also be a response (via random mutation) to social distancing & masking measures.

So the vaccine didn't cause the mutation, but the presence of the vaccine and other human countermeasures shaped the evolution of the vaccine.

The truly amazing thing is that they cite the Delta variant as an example for why vaccines cause dangerous mutations, without noting that Delta arose in December 2020, in India.

Not a lot of folks were vaccinated there around that time.