Glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Uncertainty | A quantifiable measurement that tells us how well a specific value or result is known, acknowledging that no measurement or scientific observation can be completely exact. Science General |
| Urban Heat Island | The tendency of cities to be warmer than surrounding rural areas. Climate records correct for it, so it does not explain global warming. Climate Change Denial |
| Vaccination | The physical act of administering any vaccine. Vaccines |
| Vaccine | A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verified. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future. Vaccines |
| Vaccine Effectiveness | How well a vaccine prevents disease in real-world use, as opposed to efficacy, which is measured in controlled clinical trials. Vaccines |
| Vaccine Hesitancy | Delay in accepting or refusal of vaccines despite their availability, driven by factors such as complacency, low confidence and inconvenience. Listed by the WHO as a major global health threat. Vaccines |
| Vaccine Shedding | Release of vaccine-derived virus from a person given a live attenuated vaccine, such as oral polio vaccine. Non-live vaccines, including mRNA vaccines, cannot shed. Vaccines |
| VAERS | The US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, an open early-warning database. Anyone can submit a report, and reports are unverified, so raw counts do not show that a vaccine caused an event. Vaccines |
| Validation | Checking the accuracy of something. For example, to validate a climate model, scientists run the model to ?predict? the weather patterns over the past 20 years. Then they compare the output with the actual measurements and observations we have collected for that time. Science General |
| Variable | In scientific or mathematical models, a factor whose value may vary (e.g., average air temperature, amount of solar radiation, etc.) Science General |