TalBlack wrote: “Asking questions in response to assertions is a tactic NOT an argument. All things classified as a vaccine in the past would satisfy the definition.”
The intent of my argument was to clarify your position.
In effect, you’re claiming that a substance must be 100% effective in preventing infections and 100% effective in prevening transmission to be considered a vaccine. If that is your definition then there has never been a vaccine since all known vaccines have less than 100% effectiveness.
This is exactly why the definition was changed, to make it clear that something didn’t have to be 100% effective to be considered a vaccine.
Here’s an explanation.
“What CDC did, and vaccine skeptics and others like to make an enormous deal of for no reason, is refine the operational definition of a vaccine. Nothing about their new set of words put in a particular order to define vaccination is wrong. Vaccines are not 100% safe, and they are not 100% effective, but they are safer by orders of magnitude and more effective by orders of magnitude than the alternatives to dealing with infectious pathogens.”
“At the end of the day, the definition of vaccine or vaccination has not changed. It is still the material used (vaccine) or the act of using that material (vaccination) to give advanced knowledge of an infectious pathogen to the immune system so that, if the real pathogen appears, the immune system can clear it as fast as possible, hopefully preventing disease. If, suddenly, everyone in the world understood the word “vaccine” to be a type of tree or a species of cat, then we’d have a change in definition”
“In effect, you’re claiming that a substance must be 100% …”
Nope. You came up with that. A vaccine was a vaccine for everyone on the planet earth until it suddenly wasn’t and purely political exigencies required redefinition. Straight out of 1984.