Scamp wrote:"Vaccination went from "the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease" to "to produce protection from a specific disease." Immunity and protection are two different things."
CDC was quite right to deprecate the term "immunity." Immunity, as understood by the general public, does not (and cannot) exist - whether you're talking about mRNA tech or older types of vaccines.
Immunity, to the unscientific mind, implies a 100% blockade against a virus infecting a host. No such immunity is possible - only various levels of protection. Protection is a much better term.
Vaccination cannot prevent a virus from an initial infection, because that is not how immunity works. Your immune system recognizes a virus and deploys killer cells to attack,
after the virus has infected its host.
What a vaccine does is provide an inactive target for the immune system, to allow it a rapid response when the real thing shows up. The defining feature of a vaccine is an anticipatory priming of the immune system, rather than directly attacking the virus itself (as do anti-virals like Paxlovid).
The human immune system provides a good level of protection, depending on various factors. But it is not a guaranteed immunity, whether aquired through vaccination or the disease itself.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. -Antonio Gramsci