Everyone is bad at describing the vaccines, including me.
By Katherine J. Wu
The Atlantic
August 12, 2021
For the past year or so, I鈥檝e been reporting on the COVID-19 vaccines, a job that鈥檚 required me to convey, again and again, how inoculations work to boost immunity and why. The shots are new, and . So I, like so many others in journalism and science, turned to analogies to help make the ideas of disease prevention and public health tangible. Vaccines, as I鈥檝e written, protect us a lot like , , and .
Analogies, metaphors, similes, and the like are evocative and memorable. They transform the abstract into the concrete. And they , especially when used to depict a virus or an infection, which are almost entirely unseen. But a lot of the ideas we link to COVID-19 vaccines鈥攊ncluding plenty I鈥檝e used鈥攄on鈥檛 totally hit the mark. Too many focus on vaccines鈥� individual perks. And they end up skating over one of the greatest benefits of immunization: a boost in wellness at the community level, by cutting down on transmission and, by extension, illness for everyone else. For immunization to truly pack a punch, Amanda Simanek, a social epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, told me, 鈥渨e all have to do it.鈥�
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