[quote Beachcomber]@HoardingSamphireSaurus
I am not sure why you have posted the WHO page or the dictionary definition that describes a vaccine and immunization. They are just that, a defintion, simple explanation.
Oh! I see! You want to define a vaccine by its efficacy rates. And you are caviling over terminology.
Well, a therapeutic vaccine treats a disease. They are a treatment. A specific type of treatment!
Sorry, I hadn't realised you were attempting sophistry! I'd have disengaged earlier if I had!
As I said earlier I'm struggling slightly with your rather cryptic style of posting.
But what I sort of figured out what from you said above is that covid vaccines can be classified as therapeutic vaccines and therefore can legitimately be classified as vaccines.
OK.
So let's take a look at what a therapeutic vaccine is.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_vaccines
A therapeutic vaccine is a vaccine which is administered after a disease or infection has already occurred. A therapeutic vaccine works by activating the immune system of a patient to fight an infection. A therapeutic vaccine differs from a prophylactic vaccine in that prophylactic vaccines are administered to individuals as a precautionary measure to avoid the infection or disease while therapeutic vaccines are administered after the individual is already affected by the disease or infection. A therapeutic vaccine fights an existing infection in the body rather than immunizing the body for protection against future diseases and infections.
www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/when-vaccine-not-vaccine
Like prophylactic vaccines, therapeutic vaccines aim to teach the immune system how to destroy a pathogen or other disease-causing entity (e.g. cancer cells), by introducing an antigen associated with it. But rather than training it against new pathogens, the goal of therapeutic vaccines is to persuade the immune system to fight harder against an existing illness.
But that isn't how covid vaccines are being used.
And that unerringly leads to a huge question mark over how covid vaccines are being marketed, administered and recommended. They seem to be neither prophylactic vaccines nor therapeutic vaccines.
But certainly if one is going to argue that they are therapeutic vaccines that generates big question marks on the ethics and legitimacy of coercing people who are recovered from sars-cov-2 into having therapeutic vaccines for a virus they have recovered from.[/quote]
OK @Beachcomber. So you mentioned vaccines and treatments - I pointed out that therapeutice vaccines are treatments. That's the point of them.
Now you want to change that to prophylactic vaccines and you think that there is something amiss with this because there are a lot of ways a vaccine can work. You lept into the Gavi site without pausing at the simple first message, which seems to have led to a misunderstanding.
When is a vaccine not a vaccine?
Most vaccines are given to healthy people to prevent infection with a disease-causing organism, but sometimes vaccines are used to fight an existing infection or illness. Such ‘therapeutic’ vaccines are being developed for numerous illnesses, including dengue, cholera and cancer.
3 December 2020
As for the ethics and legitimacy of coercing people who are recovered from sars-cov-2 into having therapeutic vaccines for a virus they have recovered from. I can only refer you back to the previous posts that you said you dind't undertsand. The ones in answer to your previous assertion that people weren't getting reinfected in meaningful numbers.
Oh, and I don't actually believe you don't understand. Mainly because of the way your language changes. You don't undertsand yet you then post some fairly sophisticated sentences... unless you are using scientific jargoin you also don't undertsand.
Either way, it makes debating with you just a little bit like herding cats!