When you say “true vaccines”, I’m not sure what you mean. Do you consider toxoids like the diphtheria and tetanus vaccines to be “true vaccines”? How about a subunit vaccine like the pertussis vaccine? Is that a “true vaccine”? The Hib conjugate vaccine? And heterologous vaccines? Viral vector vaccines?
Your question leads me to think you may believe we suddenly jumped from an inactivated whole pathogen to mRNA. Most people who study vaccines break them up into three generations. The first generation vaccines were primarily attenuated or inactivated pathogens. These had a lot of risks around improper or incomplete attenuation enabling pathogenic reversion to wild type (i.e. you get the disease from the vaccine). Second generation vaccines include conjugate, subunit, and similarly constructed vaccines. These eliminated the risk of incomplete attenuation, but had a number of allergy related issues. Both of these generations required a long time to develop and a long time to produce because they have to be cultured (or grown). Third generation vaccines like the mRNA platform enable faster, safer, more effective targeted antigen delivery to the human immune system.
So yes, of course I make a distinction. But the course of events is far more complicated than many might otherwise realize.
My goodness. You sure got long winded with that convoluted answer. You went all the way around. Look at the first sentence and then the last.
Also, you demurely suggest this third generation “vaccine” as a given. Do you not know that, as we text, its very first trial on humans is underway? You sure did beat around the bush to get to the only correct answer. A lot of words, little substance. Any fool can see that this mRNA shot is nothing like the successful vaccines used prior to it.