SarahC97
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2016
Certainly, your choice is your own and I hope you will consider getting the J&J shot if that's what you're comfortable with, but I have seen it stated more than once that mRNA vaccines are too new to know what the long-term impact will be and that's not precisely true.Nobody can answer that because nobody knows. There has never been a messenger RNA vaccine before. I’m concerned about long term autoimmune issues developing. I am not an anti vaxxer, never refused a shot in my life. I’d do the J&J which is made from dead Covid like a traditional vaccine but nothing will assuage my fears about mRNA except time.
I work in medical research and, first and foremost, even new technology has to undergo some serious evaluation and testing (even in an emergent situation such as COVID) before it can be approved for use. No corners were cut in the approval process of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, no shortcuts were taken. The process was faster than usual because researchers had already built an mRNA platform for cancer and other vaccines under trial. It meant this could be put into action as soon as the genomic sequence of the virus was shared. The results of their clinical trials are solid.
But to address long-term side effects, while it may be true that these vaccines are the first mRNA vaccines to complete all clinical trial stages and be licensed for use, the technology has been around for a while. Human trials of cancer vaccines using the same mRNA technology have been taking place since at least 2011. If there was a real problem with the technology, we’d have seen it before now. And they're closely monitoring that the vaccine does not trigger an unwanted immune response.
Please understand that I completely respect where you're coming from on this and certainly am not trying to talk you into anything, but I also just wanted to address the issue in a larger sense because I feel like there's a lot of misinformation about the technology used in these vaccines out there precisely for the reasons you mentioned -- that there's never been an approved mRNA vaccine used on this scale before. Personally, I find it exciting. This technology will play a huge role in epidemics going forward and save millions of lives.