> A vaccine can’t prevent infection, and it’s not intended to…
Yet it was "marketed" differently at the initial stage.
Pandemic should be a subject of deep sociological study. We went through TV showing death bodies laying on the ground, doctors and medical personnel being completely exhausted yet having time and strength to record dance videos on TikTok, masks being useless and then being obligatory, people dying after the car crash and being counted as Covid deaths because they were tested positive, people having other health issues than Covid not getting medical help, calling people tin-foil hat anti-vaccs or granny killers even if they had all other vaccinations because they voiced a slightest concern or pointed contradictory claims in the official information, telling stories about poor children dying under respiratory devices, while asking their parents why they didn't get them vaccines, without any reflection of this in official data, and at the end experts telling we will all die if we don't get all 3 doses of vaccines, and yet being alive and well after only 64% of population took 1 dose or more.
It all, and more, happened in my country, and I guess in others situation was more or less similar. It could all be rationally explained (government can make bad decisions, experts can be wrong, data is being updated, media feeding on strong emotions of fear or anger etc.), but the damage is done and if there would be next pandemic (and there will be) people are going to be even less trustful and more contrarian, to large extent thanks to people like you.
I’ve known since highschool that a virus is a protein coat that wraps a bit of nucleotide, that “infection” means that protein coat has successfully entered your body and taken up residence, and that a vaccine’s job is to prepare your defensive systems to recognize what otherwise it would not.
I’ve no idea why your country has done such a bad job educating you, nor why you’ve allowed yourself to be so uninformed about the very basics of immunology and virology… I’m sorry they’ve failed you. But, when - not if — you face a really serious communicable pandemic (which, let’s be real, SARS-CoV-2 does not and never did represent), if you die because of your resistance to both information and “marketing” (good or bad) it will be your own fault, not mine.
And, amazingly, when you reach, say, 96, and you do die, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll die of complications of infection from a descendent of SARS-CoV-2.
Also, re: the definition changing, pre-2015 the only vaccines we had for viruses were so-called live-attenuated vaccines, which usually got shortened to “weakened or killed virus” because most people are too uniformed (and uninformable) to understand that viruses are not alive and cannot be killed. Essentially we took remnants of virions from organisms that had survived infection and brute-force introduced those remnants into humans in order to provoke an immune response (ie immune protection, there never has been and never could be a world in which a primed immune response is the same thing as permanent and irrevocable immunity, though again most people can’t understand this so it gets short-handed). Post 2015 we had artificially produced viral proteins we could synthesize and introduce… post 2020/1 that arsenal now includes mRNA-produced targeted proteins, which is friggin amazing tech.
But no jab ever offered lifelong permanent immunity… every jab ever just offered you some response to that specific virion in the future. If the virus mutates fast (as all coronaviruses and influenza viruses do) then that protection naturally decays over time as the protein drifts away from what you’ve been exposed to. That’s why you have to get a new booster every year for fast-evolvers, every five to ten years for slow evolvers, and probably never again in your lifetime for glacially slow evolvers.
