There’s an injection that we’ve all heard of. A lot of us get one every year. The injection doesn’t make you immune to the disease it’s protecting you from, it just makes you less susceptible to having a bad case of it. You may still get sick, just not as sick. And, if you do get sick, you’re still going to be contagious to others. And, you might die.
Quick, what’s it called?
Everybody calls it a flu shot.
It’s rarely called a flu vaccine. If you go to the CVS or Walgreens or even Walmart Web sites right now, you’ll see that it’s called a “flu shot”. Even my doctor asked me if I had received my flu shot this year. She didn’t ask me if I had received my “flu vaccine”.
We’ve been taught that the word “vaccine” means something very specific. It means that if you’re vaccinated, and then exposed to whatever disease the vaccine protects you from, you won’t contract the disease and you won’t spread it to others.
So, when people hear the word “vaccine” they think of smallpox, polio or even tetanus. If you’re vaccinated against any of those, you won’t catch them. That’s how vaccines work.
But the flu shot doesn’t work that way. And neither does the COVID vaccine.
The flu shot is nearly always called a “flu shot” so that people’s expectations aren’t set too high. The term “shot” doesn’t imply the same efficacy as the term “vaccine”. So, people are more likely to understand that while it may give them some ability to fight off the flu, it doesn’t make them immune to it.
Anyone who’s going to read this already knows that the COVID vaccines don’t make people immune to COVID. They work exactly as well as the flu shots. If you’re vaccinated against COVID, you might not get sick, but there’s no guarantee that you won’t.
In other words, the COVID vaccines provide some protection from the disease, but vaccinated people can still get sick. And if they do, they’re still going to be contagious. And they might die.
Just like the flu shot.
If we applied the same logic for naming the COVID injections as we did for naming the flu injection, we call them “COVID Shots”. But “shot” doesn’t sound quite as effective or impressive as “vaccine”, does it? Just ask any first-year Marketing student.
There are plenty of people who understand that a COVID shot won’t fully protect them from COVID and they still got vaccinated. That’s cool. More power to them. It’s the same reason I occasionally get a flu shot.
But, there’s also a shit-load of people who didn’t know that the vaccines don’t make you fully immune and were surprised when a large number of fully-vaccinated folks started getting COVID. Because that’s not how vaccines are supposed to work.
Calling it a “COVID vaccine” implies that the drug does something that it doesn’t. After all, if they’ve been vaccinated, there’s no way they can contract COVID. Right?
Wrong.
Their expectation of what the COVID vaccines can do for them has been set too high.
Although it should come as no surprise to anyone, COVID appears to be back on the rise. And some of the vaccinated people are mad at everyone who hasn’t chosen to get injected with an experimental drug. Presumably their logic is that, while they now seem to understand that vaccinated people can still catch COVID, they believe that unvaccinated people are the only ones capable of spreading it.
They can’t seem to put two and two together and come up with the fact that if they’re getting sick, they’re also contagious, and also spreading the disease. Just like the flu.
Maybe if we started calling them “COVID Shots” instead of “COVID Vaccines” more people would realize that they don’t provide the same benefits we’ve been taught vaccines provide. If we called them “shots”, people might start to lose the mistaken impression that the drugs are more effective than they really are.
