Vaccines are drugs that trigger immune system response. Always have been.

If you're referring to the CDC changing its layperson definition on https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm, its old definition was wrong and didn't include flu vaccines, among many others.

I like how in their minds, changing the copy on a website is "changing the definition of a vaccine" and some deep dark conspiracy theory as if it's some binding legal framework and not a public comms platform.

Slightly off topic. But what do you think of the "definition of recession"[1] debacle that is currently going on? Do you think this is similar to "changing the definition of a vaccine" that you mentioned?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+of+recession&sour...

I haven't followed it closely - but it does seem pretty similar. It's not like anything is 'triggered' when a recession is declared. And it's not like the economy is meaningfully better if you had quarterly growth of [-1%, -0.1%] vs. [-1.2%, 0.1%] -- even though by the two quarters rule, the first would be a recession and the second wouldn't.

It looks like NBER's definition of how they declare recessions has remained consistent, so I'd defer to them:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210103093754/https://www.nber....

> Vaccines are drugs that trigger immune system response. Always have been

Not really drugs per se, but at 50k feet yes that's true (but no entirely accurate).

However, the mRNA technology is new, different from traditional vaccines, and effectively untested. Untested until Covid.

This isn't a judgement or a knock. Just a fact.

All of the companies that created the mRNA vaccines for COVID had already a few years of life, and those few years were all spent testing their vaccines.

It wasn't enough testing, and a large scale test wasn't economically viable. But they also weren't completely untested. (And guess what the world spent 6 months doing at some high death rate times? Yep, large scale testing them.)

Fair enough. Then let's go with: not properly tested and approved in alignment with tradition.

The rub for many was / is the quickness of the process in contrast with the cock-sureness of the narrative (i.e., don't worry about it...just trust us...). There was also the disconnect between "trust the science" vs limited data and the shutting down of any question. Real Science is fearless.

But the process was enough to bring sureness. You seem to have a problem with the process being non-traditional, but it was the obvious adaptation to get the same sureness on the shortest possible timeframe.

The data wasn't limited in any way.

It's funny, because I have the opposite criticism. We just let people die for 6 months because we refused to act on "we are sure it's safe, we are confident it will work" and waited to have complete certainty on both of those. If we just scaled the tests further and start paying the labs before we were completely sure the vaccines work (we just really, really expected them to). We could have tested them in less than a month, and vaccinated most of the more vulnerable people in less time than that.

But if we did that, we would be open to the possibility of one of the vaccines not working. We would need a lot of transparency to deal with that, and it looks like the population can't deal with quantified certainty in any way, just with the binary version of it.

> "You seem to have a problem with the process being non-traditional,"

Really? Because that's not what I said.

You can't change a process - especially not a medical one for 100s of millions of people - and then say "We're 100% certain of this. This is all new. There are no long term side effects. And if you think or say otherwise, we will cancel you."

Anyone who knows even a bit of history - medical or otherwise - and is comfortable with that is a either naive, or on the take.

To clarify, I don't have a problem with an non-traditional process. That being said, the way the process was "sold" set off my BS detector too many times. The two are disconnected to a fault.

For example, there's this:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/07/13/1111137...

Long to short, we've had "OMG the variants..." repeated over and over, how important the jab is to that, and then how in a worldwide pandemic the threat of variants can come from anywhere.

Yet, 2 docs in Brazil have to invent their own vax? And promise to give it away? While USA Big Pharma...does what??? counts their money? Because variants aren't a threat? See?

Again, complete disconnect. Disconnect that no one should be comfortable with.

> You can't change a process - especially not a medical one for 100s of millions of people - and then say "We're 100% certain of this. This is all new.

The testing process? Of course we can, statistics is quite an established and predictive science.

Again, looks like you have a problem with a non-traditional process. You also seem to have a falling for low-quality science journalism. Both are understandable, but your failure of understanding the vaccine policies around the pandemics were due to your partial understanding, and not fault of the policies.

Yeah man, back before covid scared the living shit out of people like you I'm sure there was 'sureness'. So much 'sureness' that major investors in Fidelity were cutting huge chunks of one of the only MRNA companies valuations:

https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/ https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/28/moderna-writedown/

The only thing you were sure of is that you were terrified, and wanted anything and anyone to save you.

But hey I'm sure all those auto-immune diseases cropping up from the vaccines fall into the category of "sureness" :D