Speaking of “Vaccines” - What Do Words Even Mean, Anyway?
So…. you probably remember COVID-19, right?
And then they created a few vaccines for it, right?
I promise I'm not trying to be all “conspiracy theorist” about this (which is exactly what you would expect a conspiracy theorist to say, right?).
But I have this little thing for … facts.
I recall learning about the Covid vaccines as they were being developed and rolled out. And I recall learning that they don’t really operate in the same way that vaccines have traditionally worked.
In a nutshell (and, please, fact-check me if I’m wrong on this), the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna “elicit an immune response” from the body through a chain-reaction of mechanisms:
First, a piece of mRNA material hitches a ride into your cells via an ingeniously engineered “lipid nanoparticle.”
Second, this mRNA, once inside the cell, sends instructions to your cell to produce a protein that looks an awful lot like the “spike protein” found on the O.G. Covid variants. (The spike protein being that found on the outer-shell of the virus.)
Third, your body says “WHAT THE CRAP IS THIS THING (that I’ve just created)!” and then figures out a way to attack that spike protein. Basically, your body learns to recognize that spike protein and produces antibodies that are pretty good at attacking them.
Fourth, once the actual coronavirus (SARS-COV2, or whatever) enters your body, your body recognizes those spike proteins as being very similar to the ones your body started producing from the mRNA vaccine, and your body already knows how to attack them (gross oversimplification).
Historically, I thought, vaccines used dead or weak viruses or pieces of virus, which it could be predicted that the body would easily be able to fight off. During this process, the body sees the actual virus - or enough of it - and is able to learn how to effectively combat it in an environment that is unlikely to cause the body to succumb to the virus, itself. This results in the body having the memory to better fight off any actual encounter with the live-healthy virus “in the wild.”
That just got me thinking…. Given that these are different mechanisms, are the Covid vaccines even “vaccines,” at all?
So, I went looking to see what the definition of “vaccine” was on the authority of definitions: Merriam-Webster, and what do I see, but the following definition:
“1: a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease: such as
a: an antigenic preparation of a typically inactivated or attenuated (see ATTENUATED sense 2) pathogenic agent (such as a bacterium or virus) or one of its components or products (such as a protein or toxin)
b: a preparation of genetic material (such as a strand of synthesized messenger RNA) that is used by the cells of the body to produce an antigenic substance (such as a fragment of virus spike protein)
2: a preparation or immunotherapy that is used to stimulate the body's immune response against noninfectious substances, agents, or diseases.”
That struck me as a little odd, because I didn’t ever remember mRNA being widely acknowledged as a “vaccine.”
So, I went to the great Internet Wayback Machine to see if this mRNA bit had changed recently. Sure enough. The definition that was archived on January 18, 2021 was simply:
a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease
And then the definition that was archived 8 days later, on January 26, 2021, included the mRNA business.
This definition change happened within 6 weeks of the December, 2020 Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer Covid vaccine.
That seems kind of sudden and kind of coincidental. Basically we’re giving a new process a familiar old name and maybe that makes us feel better about it. Was it clever marketing? Is it just semantics? Is it just the natural evolution of language? Words do change meaning over time.
Failing all else, it does seem like it’s a fine use of the word to cover the new mRNA “elicit an immune response” mechanism. But let’s not forget that when talking about “vaccines” like they’ve been around for hundreds of years — only the kind of vaccine that uses dead/weak virus has been around for hundreds of years. The newer 2021-definition doesn’t have the same “provenance.” There may be contexts in which that is an important distinction to make.
I guess that’s all I’m trying to say - not that anybody asked.