[tuna-piano]

My theory is that anti vaxxers have poisoned the public conversation (if you say anything questioning a vaccine you shall be shunned). I plan to get this vaccine and generally trust our scientific institutions.

But of course there are legitimate safety concerns with injecting stuff into people - which is why they ran a huge study to show that there are no short term safety concerns.

I'm just asking (not implying anything) a real medical question I don't know the answer to - how do we know this vaccine doesn't increase the chances of some condition 20 years later when the median time people have been vaccinated is two months? And with a brand new vaccine platform that has never been used before...

[2-tpg]

It is my understanding that adversaries of Western nations have already started disinformation campaigns to mess up the vaccination effort. The entire Bill Gates / 5G causes COVID discussion from a few months back was fabricated; their current playbooks should be more sophisticated and target also outside the big social networks, perhaps even on this very site.

Also, that governments will show little patience for anti-vax talk of its citizens. They'll have to switch talking points from avoiding panic (It's harmless for young people!) to accepting the vaccine (There are many long-term effects of infection!). A Herculean effort in balancing propaganda with allowing free speech.

If nothing else, it is going to be interesting watching the next months unfold. Saying you are refusing the vaccine may simply put you on a list, but openly detracting from the vaccination efforts, should see some actual (and scary) pushback.

Public health will be an increasingly difficult thing to manage, when individuals get the information for their decisions online (however wrong).

[bluGill]

We have learned a lot about how the human body works. There is no plausible way that there could be something bad: the vaccine breaks down in the way RNA does withing minutes of entering the body. If anything bad happens because of RNA breakdown: you wouldn't have been born as RNA is basic to cell biology and breaks down as part of normal processes all the time.

The first mRNA vaccine went to phase 1 trials more than 10 years, which means we have a few people walking around who got a mRNA vaccine more than 10 years ago - if they got a side effect it wouldn't be noted. The sample size is of course too small, and it was a different vaccine, but there some long term safety data.

Anything is possible. My physics teachers like to point out that all the air in the room can teleport to the moon - but the odds of that are too low to worry about, even on the time frame of the universe.