I don't know if that's a widespread definition of "vaccine". I think it might be personal to you, and you might be imagining the societal consensus around it.
The Covid vaccines are thought to stave off about half of serious complications from the disease among older people. That is thought to amount to thousands of avoided deaths per year in America.
> I don't know if that's a widespread definition of "vaccine".
Wikipedia [1]: "A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease." One reference for that statement is the CDC's web page on "immunization basics".
> you might be imagining the societal consensus around it.
I don't think there's as much of a societal consensus around it now, because, as I said, flu "vaccines" have been around for quite a number of years (they were around for quite a number of years before Covid), and that has changed how people think of the word "vaccine". However, I think the word still has an unconscious connotation of something having a stronger effect than just "well, you have less chance of being hospitalized". See further comments below.
In any case, my point is that I think using the word "vaccine" for the flu and Covid shots is broken. "Vaccine" when I was growing up and got all those shots did mean "thing that prevents you from getting the disease". That was the whole point; that was what everybody talked about when you got shots as a kid so you could go to school, or when you got shots before traveling internationally so you wouldn't catch any of the endemic diseases where you were going.
When we began to encounter diseases for which we could not do that, where the best we could do was to give shots that might make them less severe but didn't keep you from getting the disease, we should have picked a different word instead of muddying the meaning of the word "vaccine".
Doing that would have made it much clearer exactly what governments were trying to do by mandating Covid "vaccines". But governments traded on the unconscious connotations of the word "vaccine" to justify the mandates. Mandating something that doesn't prevent you from getting the disease, doesn't prevent you from spreading it if you have it, but might help in keeping you out of the hospital, makes no sense from a public health perspective. But that's not what people thought was being mandated, because of the word "vaccine".
> "effective"
They might be effective at making the disease less severe. They are not effective at preventing you from getting the disease, or preventing you from spreading it if you have it.
