> They are instead similar to seasonal flu shots.

"Flu shots", aka seasonal flu vaccine.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/keyfacts.htm

It seems that your personal belief of what a vaccine is does not match the real concept of what a vaccine is and always was.

According to the CDC, here is the definition of vaccine/immunity: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm

Immunity: Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected. Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease

> Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease

I'm not sure you hit an eventual consistency thing while you read the source you cited, but the definition of a vaccine in it does not match your definition.

A vaccine, according to the CDC source you quoted, is:

> Vaccine: A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases. (...)

Keep in mind that your personal definition of a vaccine does not match how most vaccines work, if any vaccine at all.

From the CDC: Vaccine = "Produce immunity". Immunity = "you can be exposed to it without becoming infected" It's right there. This definition, and the most common understanding is that a vaccine means "without being infected".

Cancer immunotherapy candidates have been referred to as cancer vaccines for a long time without controversy, and they are generally not intended to prevent cancers. They are medicines that work via an immune response.

Sure, public health communication could use some improvement, but arguing over the definition “vaccine” I think is not productive

Ask someone why they'd support mandatory vaccination and generally you will hear: to stop unvaccinated people from spreading the disease. Definitions do matter here. Governments are leaning heavily on this misunderstanding.

I agree that definitions matter, and it’s important to have a clear discourse on policy implications of public health research.

But my point is that it’s incorrect to call the current Covid vaccines “not vaccines” just because they don’t 100% prevent transmission or infection. That’s only muddying the waters at the expense of a real discussion of the evidence and trade offs for any given policy position.

See pre-pandemic wiki, for example: https://web.archive.org/web/20170403082447/https://en.m.wiki...

I think I agree, that these are definitely vaccines even according to traditional definitions, but the etymology is unduly impacting real world understanding IMO. To be clear, I did not put my point to refute yours but to perhaps add an additional perpendicular view on the subject of how we are talking about these things and how selective misunderstanding is allowed to persist.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I do agree that the public discourse has not been very productive, and the news coverage has been overconfident and one-sided in one way or another, especially around omicron lately.

> I agree that definitions matter, and it’s important to have a clear discourse on policy implications of public health research.

And yet, you insist on using "vaccine" to push mandates, knowing that most people think you're promising that that said "vaccine" will keep people from spreading covid, knowing full well that it doesn't.

Where am I pushing mandates? I think there are valid policy positions on both sides of the issue, and that you’re misrepresenting the logic of those who still are in favor of vaccine mandates.

You also haven’t offered any substantive counterpoint to my main point, which is that the widely accepted definition of vaccines is broadly consistent with the current coronavirus vaccines. The scare quotes aren’t necessary and detract from a reasonable discussion of their actual utility and tradeoffs

They're not scare quotes. I'm writing about word choice, so it's appropriate to use delimiters to make it clear exactly what word I'm writing about.

Most people think that "vaccine" has a specific meaning. It is dishonest to use that label for something that doesn't conform to that meaning when communicating with those people.

Ok, sorry if I misinterpreted your punctuation, the last instance is what read like scare quotes to me; maybe `backtick` is a better delimiter for this case

> Most people think that `vaccine` has a specific meaning. It is dishonest to use that label for something that doesn't conform to that meaning when communicating with those people.

I disagree that it’s dishonest, it’s the correct term.

I agree that if most people have a misunderstanding of what constitutes a vaccine, then failing to address that is going to lead to suboptimal public health communication.

It's not the "correct" term if you know that the recipient thinks that it means something else. (All communications happens at the receiver.)

It's dishonest because they think that you're promising something that they're not going to get AND you know it.

I take your point, but by correct I meant “consistent with the established definition,” which was the original context we started in

Like I said, maybe it’s not the optimal term to use in public health communications, and that could be because of dishonesty, but it could also be due to ineptitude or just failure to appreciate a widespread misunderstanding

It's not the "established" definition with the target audience. Your argument is basically "I don't speak Spanish, so I'll talk louder and add a long 'o" at the end of words when talking to someone who only speaks Spanish."

It's hard to find a public health organization that doesn't say that communicating with the public is a key goal and core competency.

So, are they: [1] Incompetent [2] Using a different definition of "goal", "communicating", "core competency", etc? [3] ????

Note that communications isn't the only problem.

One of the arguments for [1] is that the public health folk have long said "hey, we're necessary to avoid a repeat of the Spanish Flu." yet they were largely unprepared. (Then again, flu kills 30-80k Americans every year and most of the good transmission research was done in the late 40s...)