Another angle is the redefinition of the term vaccine (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coron

Another angle is the redefinition of the term vaccine (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...). The CDC claims they redefined it away from the word “immunity” towards the word “protection” because no vaccine grants perfect immunity. Personally I find that to be a bad answer. By taking a weighty word like “vaccine” and redefining it, the expectations of risks and benefits the public holds were exploited. For the majority of the public, those who are under 50 and healthy, COVID poses little risk - it’s not much different from a typical seasonal flu. Personally I think getting an mRNA vaccine is a reasonable low-risk action but the risk of undergoing any medical intervention is nonzero, and it is higher for a novel technology. I bet that if the COVID vaccines were not called a vaccine, people would evaluate the risk reward trade off differently. The redefinition game seems to be quite frequent in American politics these days. It comes up in culture war activism (definitions for “man”, “woman”, etc) as it has for many years, but it is more disturbing to see it come from public agencies and trusted institutions like universities or hospitals or the CDC. Apart from the word “vaccine”, there is the controversial issue of COVID’s origins. Anthony Fauci repeatedly denied that the NIH was involved with Gain of Function research but they later admitted what was obvious all along, that they had indeed funded GoF (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...). One claim I’ve seen in articles is that the NIH and/or NIAID (the agency Fauci leads) basically came up with a private, narrow definition for GoF that excludes the GoF they were conducting. This is why it is important that definitions remain static unless accepted by an overwhelming majority of the public - it undermines basic communication.