Dear Editor,

It is always disappointing to see false and misleading information being shared online. It is even worse to see it from elected officials! In another nonsensical non-sequitur, Councilor Reagor this time makes the absurd claim that vaccines are not equivalent to shots. It is apparent that he did not read my original letter, as I (and peer-reviewed journal articles) never made the claim that vaccines are 100% effective. This is true for COVID and other vaccines that are already required for schools and workplaces such as polio, MMR, and tetanus. As this point was not made in good faith and is from a place of intellectual dishonesty, I will not pursue it further.

I mostly decided to write this letter to address the insane “shot vs. vaccine” argument. I was able to find the following definitions of (medical) shot:

• an injection of a drug, immunizing substance, nutrient, or medicament
• a supplementary dose of an immunizing agent administered as an injection
• a hypodermic injection

A vaccine has the following definitions:

• a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease
• biological agents that elicit an immune response to a specific antigen derived from an infectious disease-causing pathogen
• A preparation of a weakened or killed pathogen, such as a bacterium or virus, or of a portion of the pathogen’s structure, that is administered to prevent or treat infection by the pathogen and that functions by stimulating the production of an immune response.

In case you would like a source on these, I recommend looking in the dictionary. The formulas made by Pfizer, Moderna, and others are clearly both shots and vaccines. I have no idea how Councilor Reagor came up with this nonsense and I do not particularly care to know. He uses this argument to claim that Jacobsen v. Massachusetts does not apply to the COVID vaccines. That case gives this definition:

• ‘We think that it diminishes the liability to be attacked by the disease; that it modifies the character of the disease and renders it less fatal,—of a milder and less severe type; that the protection it affords against attacks of the disease is greatest during the years immediately succeeding the operation of vaccination.’

Does this sound familiar? I would bet so. I would like to ask Councilor Reagor and other people who are supposed to be authority figures to avoid spreading lies on public platforms and to help fight the pandemic for a change.

Teddy Warner