I would prefer “immunizes against COVID-19” to be better defined when asking the question. Immunizing against becoming systomatic with COVID-19 is a different value then immunizing against not being infectious with COVID-19 and both of those matter. Preventing rate of hospitalization and rate of death would also be important.
In epidemiology / medicine, etc. “Immunizes” has a technical meaning—it means you cannot contract or carry the disease. (i.e. not that you don’t get symptoms.)
By that definition Moderna and BionTech don’t have vaccines that are proven to immunize people against COVID-19. That technical meaning might be used in some communities but I think if you would ask the median rationalist whether or not there was a clinical trial whether the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine immunizes people against COVID-19 they would say “yes, there was such a trial”.
If a journalist would ask someone at the FDA or CDC the question whether such a trial I doubt they would get the answer “technically there wasn’t a trial that showed the those vaccines immunize anyone”.
The idea that the technical meaning of a scientific term is something that isn’t operationalized seems to me also problematic. There might be people in epidemiology who believe that but it’s ontologically problematic and causes a lot of harm.
“Immunity” and “efficacy” seem like they should refer to the same thing, but they really don’t. And if you talk to people at the FDA, or CDC, they should, and probably would, talk about efficacy, not immunity, when talking about these vaccines.
And I understand that the technical terms and usage aren’t the same as what people understand, and I was trying to point out that for technical usage, the terms don’t quite mean the things you were assuming.
And yes, the vaccines have not been proven to provide immunizing protection—which again, is different than efficacy. (But the vaccines do almost certainly provide immunizing protection for some people, just based on the obvious prior information and the current data—though it’s unclear how well they do so, at how long after the vaccine.)
And, to make things worse, even efficacy is unclearly defined. It gets defined in each clinical trial - differently for each drug/vaccine/etc. and I don’t think it actually mean the same thing for the currently approved COVID-19 vaccines. It’s pretty similar, stopping symptomatic cases, but even given the same endpoint, it’s not necessarily identical, since the studies picked how to measure the endpoints independently, and differently.
I would prefer “immunizes against COVID-19” to be better defined when asking the question. Immunizing against becoming systomatic with COVID-19 is a different value then immunizing against not being infectious with COVID-19 and both of those matter. Preventing rate of hospitalization and rate of death would also be important.
In epidemiology / medicine, etc. “Immunizes” has a technical meaning—it means you cannot contract or carry the disease. (i.e. not that you don’t get symptoms.)
By that definition Moderna and BionTech don’t have vaccines that are proven to immunize people against COVID-19. That technical meaning might be used in some communities but I think if you would ask the median rationalist whether or not there was a clinical trial whether the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine immunizes people against COVID-19 they would say “yes, there was such a trial”.
If a journalist would ask someone at the FDA or CDC the question whether such a trial I doubt they would get the answer “technically there wasn’t a trial that showed the those vaccines immunize anyone”.
The idea that the technical meaning of a scientific term is something that isn’t operationalized seems to me also problematic. There might be people in epidemiology who believe that but it’s ontologically problematic and causes a lot of harm.
“Immunity” and “efficacy” seem like they should refer to the same thing, but they really don’t. And if you talk to people at the FDA, or CDC, they should, and probably would, talk about efficacy, not immunity, when talking about these vaccines.
And I understand that the technical terms and usage aren’t the same as what people understand, and I was trying to point out that for technical usage, the terms don’t quite mean the things you were assuming.
And yes, the vaccines have not been proven to provide immunizing protection—which again, is different than efficacy. (But the vaccines do almost certainly provide immunizing protection for some people, just based on the obvious prior information and the current data—though it’s unclear how well they do so, at how long after the vaccine.)
And, to make things worse, even efficacy is unclearly defined. It gets defined in each clinical trial - differently for each drug/vaccine/etc. and I don’t think it actually mean the same thing for the currently approved COVID-19 vaccines. It’s pretty similar, stopping symptomatic cases, but even given the same endpoint, it’s not necessarily identical, since the studies picked how to measure the endpoints independently, and differently.