this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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I'm going to preface this by saying I had the moderna series and all boosters. Also had COVID once, ironically the weekend before Id scheduled a booster. I entirely believe that the vaccine is effective at reducing infection rates and severity.
Ironic, because they literally started as "cancer vaccines", literally a niche cancer treatment. When they were first approved in 2008.
We really don't know the long term consequences of mRNA vaccines. The COVID vaccine is the first application of them at large scale, and the first application of them where we'd normally expect most recipients to still be alive and mostly healthy ten years down the road (again, because they were originally created as a cancer treatment).
Check in in 2030 and we'll know whether or not we made a good bet on that one. We probably did, but there's a reason the manufacturers were given immunity from liability for anything that comes of the COVID vaccines.
There is a common misconception that long term effects will manifest long after the injection. All vaccines with longterm effects manifested their effect shortly after the injection. It makes little sense that you will have adverse reactions months or years later because the compounds are long gone from your system.
There was also the misconception that the vaccine was rushed and that steps were skipped or shortened during testing. That is not the case. The administrative processes were prioritized and there was a huge amount of test candidates so testing could be done much quicker. The normal process is not longer because they want to gather more long term data but because it just takes longer to gather it.
There are lots of things that do damage that isn't necessarily obvious in the short term, especially if you don't know exactly what that damage might look like. There's a reason I said we probably made a good bet with mRNA vaccines for COVID, the odds that they've done some kind of damage that isn't immediately apparent and we'll see an uptick in some problem or another a few years down the line in vaccinated people is very low but not zero. If the risk of this vaccine damaging patients in some fashion that wasn't apparent within the duration of trials was zero, rather than merely low there would be no reason to make the manufacturers immune to liability from damages caused as a consequence.
On the upside, we conveniently have a large population who have decided to be the control group for mRNA COVID vaccines out of political spite so we have a large sample to compare long term outcomes between.
We know they are way safer than the old DNA vaccines because they don't literally give you a small dose of the virus like the old vaccines.