No. "Safe and effective" means that the drug manufacturers demonstrated that the drug meets FDA safety requirements during clinical trials and that the drug meets or exceeds the efficacy goals as defined prior to initiation of clinical trials. The efficacy goals would have been stated to indicate that serious illness was prevented in some percentage of the vaccine recipients.
If drug developers cannot demonstrate both safety and efficacy, drug development halts. The FDA will not approve any drug that fails to meet minimal safety or efficacy standards.
Seems as if natural immunity from a healthy immune system is far safer and more effective. And the many boosters show themselves a marketing gimmick.
"Natural immunity" is an antivax term that is not used by real scientists. It is designed to make those seeing or hearing it that somehow, disease-induced immunity is safe and natural while vaccine-induced immunity is unsafe and unnatural. In reality, the function of the immune system is completely natural no matter whether an active pathogen or an inactive antigen (a protein that stimulates immune activity) stimulates immune activity. It is difficult to even imagine what an "unnatural" immune response would be since, scientifically, it cannot exist. And as for the notion that it is safer to catch the disease than it is to get vaccinated, the data says otherwise. As of September 9, 2023, over 1.1 million people in the US had died of Covid. The number of deaths that occurred around the time of vaccination (but are not necessarily caused by it) is still in the low double digits. So the notion that getting vaccinated is more dangerous than catching a deadly disease is exaggerated by a few hundred thousand fold.
As for the necessity of taking periodic boosters, this is typical for almost all vaccines. This is because the immune system does not remember pathogens forever. The fact that people who have had Covid catch it repeatedly demonstrates that disease-induced immunity is no more durable than vaccine-induced immunity.
And the actual, documented mortality rate worldwide over the entire course of the 'pandemic" stands at about 0.08 percent.
Stating the death rate as a function of the entire population instead of those who actually catch the disease is another way professional antivaxxers gaslight people. The death rate at the population level is meaningless when determining how deadly a disease is. The real death rate of Covid is around 1% for someone who has no preexisting immunity from vaccination or disease. To illustrate, in 2021, five people in the US died from rabies. Comparing the number of deaths to the population comes out to a 0.0000015% death rate from rabies. So, as a function of population, rabies is about 53 thousand times less likely to kill than Covid. But you would be a fool to refuse rabies treatments if you have been bitten by a laboratory-confirmed rabid animal, because the real death rate of symptomatic rabies is 100% (once symptoms appear). I am not counting the handful of cases in which the rabies patient survived thanks to radical medical interventions.
Professional antivaxxers? Meaningless?
mortality rateYour seeming accusation that I am a "professional antivaxxer" is uninformed at the minimum.
If you don't like the official definition of mortality rate, cite a source for your 'other' definition or source attesting to your assertion that a mortality rate is "meaningless."