Again: The Pharmaceutical Industry is Conflating "Authorized" with "Approved"
Sublime Intellectual Noise
Reiterating the FDA Distinctions:
Officially, emergency-use authorization (EUA) means that a vaccine (or any other medical product):
is NOT approved
is experimental
is to be used at one’s own risk
has not been fully tested for safety and efficacy.
FDA approval means that a vaccine has been fully tested for safety and efficacy. It is no longer deemed experimental. Its risks, side effects, etc. are published. And the approval process takes 5-10 years to accomplish. Thus, we know that approval has not been accomplished when a vaccine has been launched after only a few months in the process.
Although there are different degrees and stages of testing for safety and efficacy, there are no degrees of approval. Saying a vaccine is “fully approved” smacks of the possibility of partial approval and there is no such thing. A vaccine is either approved or it is not. It’s like a light switch that is either on or off—and without a dimmer knob.
And a product cannot be both authorized AND approved (especially for the same application). Note this sentence from Gateway Pundit on September 11, 2023:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the approval and emergency use authorization (EUA) of updated Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for 2023-2024.
Note that many—perhaps most, perhaps almost all—doctors, nurses, and pharmacists do not know of these distinctions. According to McCullough, EUA is a new designation and the docs have no prior experience with it before the advent of the Covid-19 vaccine in late 2020.
Intellectual Noise
I believe that the conflation of authorized with approved is a deliberate—and very successful—ploy to cause intellectual noise. Some would call this head noise. And this would not be the first time the medical and pharmaceutical communities levied such noise upon us. Just hearken back to the conflations of progesterone with progestin AND aerobic (metabolism) with Aerobics (an exercise cult). There are many more word atrocities.
From a marketing perspective, the intellectual noise created by the FDA with its authorized-approved conflation is sublime. It borders on the mystical. It is successful almost beyond belief. And it comports with the precepts of Edward Bernays.
Years ago, I encountered an article wherein marketers for the pharmaceutical industry were almost bragging about their use of Bernaysian persuasion techniques. Note that Bernays is considered the father of public relations. Although a Jew, he was admired and sourced by Joseph Goebbels. He enticed prominent women socialites to march as they carried cigarettes in the 1929 Easter Day parade down Madison Avenue to ostensibly promote women’s rights—a highly successful ruse to promote cigarette smoking among women. Bernays was paid by American Tobacco.
Capturing Foreign Tongues
My neighbors are a large family of doctors and nurses from Cuba. Only the mother, her two sons, and a daughter speak English while the grandparents living with them speak only Spanish. When I discuss the FDA conflation with the mother—recently licensed as a nurse practitioner in the State of Florida—she struggles to grasp the distinctions between approved and authorized. Are not they synonyms?
For an English language monolingual like me, approved and authorized are certainly synonymous unless I’m privileged to know the proverbial secret code. One must have the secret decoder ring to translate the FDA’s encryption. And if your mother tongue is not English, well good luck decoding the encryption with your translation dictionary. [How many doctors now are from foreign mother tongues? I suppose that it is a majority.]
My sister, who is very articulate regarding the FDA distinctions, remarked that she is, “So tired of this...” I answered,
Yes… That’s part of their strategy…. That we just give up and give in to the word salad.
Make sure your doctor has the secret decoder ring!
The most despicable statement from the FDA (excerpted from its recent official statement):
"The FDA is confident in the safety and effectiveness of these updated vaccines and the agency’s benefit-risk assessment demonstrates that the benefits of these vaccines for individuals 6 months of age and older outweigh their risks."
My decoder ring states “Never trust anything with the name vaccine again.”.