Discovering a fresh trend in the skepticism of the vaccine

It has long been recognized that there may be attitudes towards vaccines specific to the vaccineso that people can take a little, but not different.

On July 26, 2021, on Twitter (later a transformation called X was renamed) about the Covid-19 vaccine:

This is not even a real vaccine. You can catch a covida and spread it if you are vaccinated. After vaccination you do not catch polio or mmr.

My colleagues and me He came across this comment and likes a lot during the analysis of nine million words of a set of data consisting of tweets about Covid and MMR vaccines published in 2008–2022 to learn more about the skepticism of the vaccine. We discovered that the author of this tweet is not alone in questioning the status of Covid-19 vaccines as vaccines and comparing it with others.

Vaccines (but not as you know them)

Our test He also studied how in the years of Pandemic people compared Covid-19 vaccines adversely with the MMR vaccine. Many described the belief that Covid vaccines were not very effective in preventing infection:

Yes, because the final vaccine is like a MMR vaccine. NO. The MMR vaccine provides 99.8% protection against catching measles, pigs or rubella. The Covid vaccine does not stop you from catching Covid. Step, but it won’t stop Covid.

Some people go a step further and claim that Covid-19 vaccines are not vaccines:

How about the fact that this is not a vaccine is a therapeutic. Real vaccines will immunity you from the virus. Covid “vaccine” still allows Covid to catch only with smaller symptoms. Not the same with polio, MMR, etc.

In some tweets, posters operate the term “shot” as opposed to the “vaccine” to suggest worse intervention, despite the fact that they mean the same:

Stop calling it a vaccine. It’s a shot.

Over 20 years ago discredited, but still influential claims that the MMR vaccine vaccine can cause autism caused a wave of vaccine skepticism. But this is a fresh kind of skepticism specific to the vaccine.

In our data, there is almost no evidence before 2020. People claim that some vaccines are not actually vaccines. In the period 2020-2022, this form of skepticism increased rapidly in relation to Covid-19 vaccines, and also complied with the flu vaccine:

Can you tell me more about this “vaccine” for flu, which allows tens of thousands of deaths? This is not a vaccine, it is a flu. Completely different than say a polio vaccine or MMR vaccine. I would claim that we do not have a flu vaccine.

How can we explain this?

Experts were already aware that some diseases, such as measles, are suitable for a vaccine: if you are vaccinated, it is very unlikely. However, other diseases, including flu and Covid-19, you can modify vaccines: if you are vaccinated, you can still be infected, but it is much less likely that you will seriously ill or die.

This does not apply to the quality of vaccines, not to mention their vaccine status, but with differences between, for example, more stable viruses and viruses that mutate with time and between different speeds at which resistance disappears.

Nevertheless, the definitions of vaccination by, for example World Health Organization and Great Britain National Health ServiceThey usually focus on preventing disease.

For pandemic, these definitions were mostly consistent with the experience of human vaccination. Even in the case of flu, there was no straightforward access to tests that could show that you were infected with a strain before which you were vaccinated.

Pandemia Covid-19 changed all this. A common experience has become a positive test for Covid-19, even after receiving one or more vaccine doses. Our studies have shown that for some people this did not undermine trust in the status of Covid-19 vaccines as vaccines. It happened to others.

This probably explains the fresh type of skepticism that we discovered, my colleagues. It is skepticism that can be divided by people who usually take vaccines for themselves and their children. The operate of informal alternatives for the term “vaccine”, such as “arrows”, in public health news may be unintentional to this confusion about what counts as a vaccine.

If it remains unadded, this fresh skepticism can affect the undertaking of seasonal influenza and Covid-19 vaccines, as well as trust in vaccines in future pandemia.