[zucked]

This was one of my (as a layperson) irritations with this process. Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune. Myself included.

I believe that the word vaccine was misunderstood on a large scale, much to our detriment. I don't know what it should have been called otherwise, but I think the messaging around the mRNA treatments was handled poorly.

[toast0]

> Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune.

If you're going to be upset about word choice, the thing to be upset about is that it has no connection to cows at all.

No vaccine grants 100% immunity. Some are more effective than others. It's hard to predict efficacy for a novel type of vaccination for a novel virus and there's no vaccines for other viruses in the same family.

Certainly, this could have been communicated better, but it's not like flu vaccines have 100% efficacy either and they've been around for decades.

[UncleMeat]

Words do matter.

But "every member of the government needs to communicate flawlessly 100% of the time during a once-in-a-century pandemic alongside a never-before-seen social media misinformation environment, even in their internal communication" is just not a bar that we can meet.

Imagine if they didn't call it a vaccine. "Of course this thing won't work, Fauci isn't even willing to call it a vaccine!"

[jghn]

If we're going to go by this, literally every vaccine should stop being called a vaccine. That's not the right answer. The right answer is to not have a population of ignorant people.

[zucked]

That can be a noble goal, but I wouldn't be so hand-wavy about how people understand words and their meanings. I'm firmly in the camp that the mRNA covid vaccine was a wonder of modern science, and on the whole it had net positives for society. Don't misunderstand, it was not rolled out, or messaged perfectly and wasn't without risk that we're likely to wrap our arms around some day in the future.

But we can learn from the experience. And in my view, telling a captive, emotional, and concerned audience "we have a vaccine!" and then not absolutely being a broken record about what that means was a miss.

[jghn]

My point was that there was absolutely nothing different about the covid vaccine in this regard from literally any other vaccine. So I'm not sure why you're putting it into a special bin here.

If the point is that the average person is uneducated and doesn't understand how vaccines work, sure. But if the solution is to use a different word, that new word would need to be applied to every vaccine on the market. And what's the point if that's the case?

Also, I don't recall ever hearing people with actual knowledge claiming it provided a cloak of invulnerability. So again, I'm not sure what those people should have done different. I'd agree that the media distorted scientific truths, but they always do that.

[reenorap]

It is/was a vaccine, I think the terminology is correct. It just didn't work effectively because the variants mutated too quickly because you're not supposed to vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic. This cause an explosion of variants and they couldn't make vaccines that tracked the new variants fast enough.

So instead they decided to change the goalposts and said "This vaccine that worked on the variant 2 years ago will still protect from severe symptoms" when in fact it did nothing and people kept getting infected.

It wasn't the vaccine itself it was how it was sold to us by Pfizer, Moderna and the politicians.