Especially in the context of the past few years with mRNA vaccines, the "anti-vaxxer" label really just indicates that the person using it as a pejorative is either a simpleton or a shill. Why? There are a wide range of vaccine types for a wide array of virus types with a wide array of immune responses, durability, and safety profiles. So you have to evaluate each and every vaccine on its own merits.
In general, vaccines for slow mutating non-zoonotic viruses with long incubation times tend to be more effective and durable than vaccines for fast mutating zoonotic respiratory viruses with short incubation times like Sars-Cov-2. The more epitopes of multiple proteins from a virus that vaccines use, the broader the immune response with less likelihood of antigen escape. So an inactivated or attenuated vaccine using the whole virus with all of its proteins is going to provide a broader immune response that’s harder to evade than a vaccine that relies on only a few epitopes of a single protein of a virus. The Sars-Cov-2 mRNA vaccines rely on only a few epitopes of spike (S) protein’s receptor binding domain [RBD] and N-terminal domain [NTD] for its antigen. The NTD and RBD are the portions of this fast mutating single strand RNA virus that mutate the most.
We’ve also aggrandized all the successful vaccines for viruses. Though we don’t even recognize all the failed attempts to make vaccines for a number of different viruses including Hep C, HiV, Epstein Barr, MERS, Sars-1, West Nile, Norovirus, Herpes HSV-1, etc. Vaccines are not always successful. More often they’re not.
