[blackeyeblitzar]

Didn’t these companies ask for and get immunity from liability relating to these vaccines? What do you make of that?

Also are these products really correctly labeled as vaccines given their protection is imperfect and not like actual vaccines? I wonder if some other term is more accurate and would eliminate some of the arguments around them.

[tlb]

Why wouldn't you ask for liability protection? No matter how safe, like even if the injection was actually pure water, thousands of people would be convinced they were injured and sue for millions which, even if you won every case, costs a fortune in legal fees.

No vaccine is perfect. They work by showing your immune system some example germ features, and most people's immune systems learn to defend against them. But immune systems are extremely complex and variable between people, and you can never guarantee a particular response.

Vaccines sometimes completely eliminate some diseases (smallpox is one). They do this not by giving every person 100% protection individually, but by reducing transmission enough that the germ dies out.

[jjoonathan]

> given their protection is imperfect and not like actual vaccines

Since when were "actual vaccines" anywhere near perfect? The COVID vaccines were unusually good for vaccines, not unusually bad.

Even a low-efficacy vaccine can still be high-efficacy in a population due to herd immunity (you don't need 100% protection, you just need to push R below 1.0 so that the infected subpopulation sees exponential decay rather than exponential growth), but we don't even need to consider this nuance in the case of the COVID vaccines because they surprised so strongly to the upside.