People no longer know what to do about the COVID pandemic. Part of the problem is the very language we use to talk about it. Words such as “breakthrough,” “booster” and even “sick” mean different things to different people — and to experts and the general public. The solution is for experts to be mindful of words that have various popular meanings, and to avoid others altogether. Public health officials who wonder why the public is ignoring them — or who blame scientific illiteracy for their own muddy communication — should consider adopting a new glossary for the pandemic’s third year.
The language problem really hit me when Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in a video talk that he wished experts had never used the term “breakthrough infection.” This descriptor makes it sound as if the COVID vaccines failed. But in other diseases, asymptomatic or mild infections often coexist with vaccination.
Offit also suggested jettisoning the term “booster” and redefining fully vaccinated simply as two, three or four shots, depending on various risk factors and age. That might encourage people to get the additional shots they need. Last winter, the critical care physician Roger Seheult told me that most patients he was seeing in the intensive-care unit during the omicron surge had serious health conditions (one was a kidney transplant recipient) but had not gotten that third dose of vaccine. Thirty percent of Americans over 65 never got a booster, though they are vastly more likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID than younger people.
