The vaccine never stopped you from getting COVID, it just gave you a better response when you got it.
I do not understand why this doesn’t click with people.
I do not understand why this doesn’t click with people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
What stopped the pandemic was omicron that was so explosively contagious that 98+% of the world got it at the time. After that everyone had natural immunity that caused decreasing symptoms every subsequent time you got infected with a new variant.
Source?
There was a study in 2024 that researched what exactly lead to the sudden decline in Covid deaths [0]:
...suggest that a phase transition in the molecular structure of the COVID-19 spike protein made the virus less likely to cause severe infections.
[0] https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/research-ne... click on the link directly to the study. It's a .pdf.
Please provide actual data supporting your ridiculous claim. You won't because you're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too.
Don't you have some coloring books to fill in or something?
You have zero authority to claim such a thing. If you want to try that route, I'd suggest you actually come with something to back up such a line.