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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   21606 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Common usage is imprecise or inaccurate all the time, that does not mean that anything was redefined or renamed.

Plenty of questionable stuff happened during COVID but the COVID vaccine and all the other vaccines are still vaccines.

No. There was a dictionary definition that matched the common usage. The covid vaccines were far and away from the dictionary definition which reflected common usage. They then changed the dictionary definition to match their technical usage.

However, every day people still operated under the common usage. TPTB preyed upon people mistaking the common usage for the technical usage and when called out on it cited the changed dictionary.

People misuse technical terms all the time, that doesn't change the fact that vaccines have never really provided "immunity." Yes the COVID and Flu vaccines are less effective than some other ones, but popular misunderstanding doesn't mean they aren't vaccines, they've always been referred to as vaccines in the literature.

You seem to miss the entire point of my motte and Bailey argument.

I'm saying the influenza vaccine is a vaccine. I'm saying the COVID vaccine is a vaccine. You can be mad about things that happened during COVID without conspiratorial rigamarole about names and definitions.

While I'm usually pretty happy to blame the public health experts it really isn't their fault laymen misunderstood what a vaccine is and does, again that says nothing about if the COVID vaccine should have been mandatory or whatever.

It isn’t conspiratorial when the dictionary definition changes over night. Good riddance.

This is mistaken. I was studying this stuff in 2010. There were lots of vaccine studies for malaria and the results showed them to be bad vaccines that produced some-but-minimal utility. As such they were not rolled out. They were still vaccines.

Vaccine has always been used to describe a category of things that provoke the immune system with relevant disease material in some fashion to provide a targeted response and resistance to future infection.

The common usage was based on being exposed to the best vaccines that made it through testing. Did TPTB lean on this to drum up support for a vaccine of low efficacy? Yes. Did that mean the COVID and flu vaccines weren’t vaccines, or that the dictionary definition changed? No.

Dictionary.com in 2016:

any preparation used as a preventive inoculation to confer immunity against a specific disease, usually employing an innocuous form of the disease agent, as killed or weakened bacteria or viruses, to stimulate antibody production.

Dictionary.com today:

any preventive preparation used to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific disease, using either messenger RNA or killed or weakened bacteria or viruses to prepare the body to recognize a disease and produce antibodies.

It can be argued that the word "usually" in the older definition always hid more treatments than the one that the layman was taught about in high-school biology class. But it is not deniable that the dictionary definition (and the CDC definition) did change.

That's fair, I see how that would cause upset. I tried to search wayback for a better dictionary (the Oxford Dictionary) but had a little trouble.

I will stand by my assertion that the more expansive definition was in medical use before COVID.

EDIT: Oxford dictionary 1989 uses "A preparation of the causative organism or substance of a disease (or its products) that has been specially treated for use in vaccination" for vaccine and "The inoculation of an individual with any vaccine in order to induce or increase immunity." (emphasis mine) for vaccination. That to my mind suggests it has always been acknowledged that effectiveness of a vaccine is on a sliding scale and that vaccine is a type of treatment not a type of effect.

https://archive.org/details/OXD1989ENEN/19%20-%20Oxford%20English%20Dictionary%20%281989%29/page/386/mode/2up

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