Aris KatzourakisI am particularly vexed by the continued usage of #ImmunityDebt. It is not an established concept, and has never been used prior to the pandemic. And it mixes and matches a) population immunity, which is trivially true, b) individual severity effects, which are not, c) has echoes of the still controversial 'hygiene hypothesis', and d) uses a loaded colloquialism - 'debt' - to whom, and why? Would much prefer we stuck to precise terminology.
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@ariskatzourakis I think a lot of the arguments in The Other Place (which I've tried to avoid engaging with!) stem from exactly the points you make. "Reduced herd immunity" didn't really need a new term, "immunity debt" doesn't make much sense at the individual level, and as you say "debt" is a heavily loaded term.
Lars MΓΈlgaard Saxhaug@LawtonTri @ariskatzourakis Whatever one feels about the term, I think many have fallen into the same trap as with herd immunity. Denying the true phenomenon it describes, rather than constructively focusing on what it actually means and the simple fact that population immunity is much more costly in lives and life quality if attained by infection rather than by vaccination.
@load_dependent @ariskatzourakis that's why I stayed out of it! Too many people (even accomplished scientists) using the term in an ambiguous fashion (when it's really unnecessary for it to exist in the first place as per @ariskatzourakis above) which was causing a lot of trouble.
@load_dependent @LawtonTri part of the problem though is what people take the term to mean. If it was simply a 'compression' of infections in a shorter period of time, which is one of the less objectionable uses of it, that would be one thing. But many imply a lot more than that.