I ran into a friend of mine earlier this week. Let’s call her “Jessica”. She was all excited about the possibility of getting a COVID-19 vaccine. The conversation went something like this.
Jessica: My whole family is planning on getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
Me: Why?
Jessica: Because it’s the vaccine!
Me: You do know that it’s an experimental vaccine, right?
Jessica: I may have heard something about that.
Me: Did you know that some people die after taking the vaccine?
Jessica: No. I hadn’t heard that.
Me: Did you know that it won’t stop you from getting sick?
Jessica: What do you mean? It’s a vaccine!
Me: Did you know that you could still be contagious, so you’ll still be expected to wear a mask and social distance?
Jessica: No.
I think that’s probably enough of the conversation to make my point. There are a lot of people like Jessica who are convinced that the COVID-19 vaccine is going to let them get back to their life. But it won’t.
The COVID-19 vaccinations don’t reduce your chance of contracting the disease when exposed to the virus. The vaccine, at best, will only hide the symptoms. And, if you don’t have the symptoms, you may not know that you’re sick and contagious. The result is that there will likely be more people running around contagious than before the vaccine was introduced.
I remember back in grade school, lining up with all the other kids to get my vaccinations. We were vaccinated against Polio, Smallpox, Measles, Mumps and Rubella (those were the big ones back then). We got our shots and we didn’t get sick. Because that’s what vaccinations do. Vaccines don’t make sure you only get a little sick, vaccines make sure that you don’t get sick at all.
For example, the Smallpox vaccine is 95% effective in preventing Smallpox. A single dose of the MMR vaccine is 93% effective in preventing measles, 78% effective in preventing mumps and 97% effective in preventing rubella. If you take the full regimen of the polio vaccine, it can be 100% effective in preventing polio.
So, people hear the word “vaccine”, and they think taking it will prevent them from contracting a disease. Because, according to the definition of a vaccine, “vaccines confer immunity”.
While most of these vaccines aren’t 100% effective, they do stop a very large number of people who are vaccinated from contracting the respective disease. Over time, if you’re one of the few unlucky people who isn’t protected by the vaccine, the chances that you’ll run across someone who is infected and contagious approaches zero. That’s what herd immunity is all about.
But the COVID-19 “vaccines” don’t make you immune because they don’t prevent the disease. And, since the number of people infected isn’t reduced, the “vaccines” do nothing to improve herd immunity. Even worse, the COVID-19 “vaccines” actually reduce herd immunity because they just make you think you’re not sick while you’re still contagious and out and about infecting others.
For most people, the vaccine will provide little, if any, benefit. Because most people who contract COVID-19 will be just fine without the vaccine. Being “vaccinated” won’t help you “protect grandma” nor will it expedite life going back to normal. But people still believe that the COVID-19 “vaccine” will prevent the disease because that’s what vaccines have done since they were invented.
We need a different word for something that doesn’t prevent a disease but merely masks its symptoms and might, just maybe, make you feel a little better than if you hadn’t been treated at all.
We need to stop using the word “vaccine” because that implies that it will make you immune to the disease and that it can deliver something that it can’t. We could use “inoculation”, but I think people would tend to confuse that with “vaccination”. We can’t use the word “prophylactic” because a prophylactic prevents things and the COVID-19 vaccines actually make the spread of the disease more likely.
I think the best word is probably just “medicine” because it sort of seems like the over-the-counter flu remedies that don’t actually cure the flu but simply lessen the symptoms to make you feel better.
The COVID-19 “vaccine” is being sold as a be-all-end-all solution for defeating COVID-19. People are led to believe that by being vaccinated they’ll be able to resume their lives, lockdowns will cease, businesses will reopen, and the spread of the disease will be reduced. But none of those things are true.
We need a term for a medicine that claims to do big things but doesn’t deliver as promised. Luckily, there’s already a term for that. It’s called “snake oil”.
