Here's a definition of life in list form which would omit viruses:
[1] active movement (may be subcellular only)
[2] obtain nutrients
[3] metabolize / channel and store energy / generate heat
[4] eliminate waste
[5] complex organization (organelles, organ systems)
[6] cellular
[7] organic
[8] growth / development
[9] reproduction / replication
[10] homeostasis / repair
[11] sensitive / responsive
[12] adapt / evolve / mutate
[13] similar biochemistry (proteins, ATP, DNA, etc.)
let's blow that off....and keep it simple
I prefer to not blow it off. My reason is the same as yours: simplicity. I find it helpful to have as clear and as simple a definition as possible in mind with any word, one that makes it easy to decide whether any given entity fulfills the definition or not. Too much simplicity at the definitional level leads to too much ambiguity and confusion later. Consider words like atheist and religion. An inability of people to come up with clear, simple definitions of such ideas underlies thousands of posts of people talking past one another making zero progress. This could well become another such topic, as people with no clear idea about what they mean by "alive" disagree about what is alive or even dead without knowing what one another mean.
This list is a set of characteristics that together are being called life. Things that fail to meet this definition are considered nonlife. If they formerly met this definition, they can be called dead or killed. All other things are not alive and never were. By this reckoning, that includes viruses.
Living things are dissipative structures that organize themselves around and channel energy. As such, they exist in a far-from-equilibrium state that they require that energy to maintain (homeostasis), and which ends with death, as the organism begin to decompose and return to equilibrium, as when the then become room temperature.
A virus begins in equilibrium with its surroundings, like a crystal, which is a lot of what it means to not be alive.
Unlike what is being called life here, viruses don't need an energy source and nutrients to survive and reproduce. They don't repair themselves, they don't grow but rather are assembled full size, they have no moving parts, they don't use sex (merging gametes) or division (meiosis/mitosis) to reproduce because they are not cellular but instead turn to organisms made of a cell or cells to do that for them. They can be lysed, for example, but they can't be poisoned or starved or asphyxiated, since they don't metabolize. They can't be attracted or repulsed. Their organization is simple: nucleic acids encased in a protein cover, like a Tootsie Roll Pop.
You are free to use your own definition if you like, but it would be helpful if you could say what it is so that others will know what kinds of things you mean to include or exclude when you use the word.
vaccines are sample bits of something.....DEAD
As I wrote, we don't normally call things that were never living dead.
Also, the thread is about whether viruses are alive, not anti-viral vaccines. The two are not synonymous. Neither is alive by the definition for life I suggested.
no one is injected with a LIVING specimen
they KILL the virus......
The word we use for a virion that can cause infection is virulent, meaning the ability to overcome host defenses and cause disease. Sometimes, these are weakened first, then injected intact - so-called attenuated vaccines. in virology and immunology, a "live" viral vaccine is a metaphor an attenuated viral vaccine, and a "killed" vaccine is just a metaphor for an injected inactivated virus. Infection is possible if the virus isn't sufficiently inactivated.
Are you aware that some of the new vaccines are not viruses, but just strands of messenger RNA (mRNA) excised from viral RNA that direct us to produce pieces of the outer shell of the virus such as the spikes that allow them to attach to human cells, but by themselves rather than as part an intact virus (virion) to stimulate an immune response? Unlike vaccines made from whole viruses, these pieces of a virion can't cause infection.
