No Stupid Questions

Your friend is an idiot. MRNA vaccines are not new. Scientists have been working on a vaccine since SARS, which is similar to COVID (aka SARS-CoV-2). One of the reasons why medication can take so long to reach the public is that it takes money, which likely come from grants, which take time and have limited amounts to go around. When the pandemic broke out, countries around the world threw money at these labs. Everything else pretty much stopped, so they didn't have to wait for an understaffed and underfunded FDA to approve it.

Getting the vaccine is much better than slowly suffocating because the virus destroyed your lungs. Herd immunity only works when enough people have been vaccinated and clearly we haven't reached that yet since people are still getting infected, reinfected and dying.

They are not really all that new. The research for mRNA vaccines began over 50 years ago.

mRNA vaccines are among the safest vaccines ever made. There is nothing in an mRNA vaccine that can make you sick. What they are is instructions for your immune system on how to recognize certain viruses when it sees them. You can literally email the mRNA sequence to a different lab and, provided they have the right equipment, they can make the vaccine without ever needing a sample of the virus.

The mild symptoms some people get is the immune system activating and building the viral antigens specified by the mRNA vaccine, but there is no danger of getting Covid-19 or any other disease from the Covid-19 vaccine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPeeCyJReZw

No. They are actually incredibly safe, much safer than the vaccines from last century. The big scandal from 1955, where an improperly killed polio vaccine gave polio to 40,000 kids, leaving 51 paralyzed and 5 dead, is literally impossible with mRNA vaccines.

As a doctor, I consider mRNA vaccines to be one of the most exciting developments in vaccine history. It has the potential to make vaccines something that a developer can encode, much like a programmer writing a computer program. The possible applications of this are insane.

Is your friend stuck in 2021?

The covid vaccines are three years old now. Millions of people have had 3 or 4 shots. In what world are they "new".

The question you should be asking is "are mRNA vaccines riskier than getting the diseases they're intended to prevent"

Something tells me mRNA is irrelevant. It's a common talking point among anti-vaxxers, and is typically nothing more than an excuse. It's also a form of gish-galloping, where they pile a bunch of bullshit on you and make you defend it.

Ask them some follow-up questions like these. I suspect the trend will become clear.

1. What are your thoughts on the more traditional non-mRNA covid vaccines, such as the ones from J&J or Novavax (or whatever you have in your area)?

2. When was the last time you got any vaccine, including a flu shot?

3. If you had the choice today, would you get the well-established vaccines such as polio or measles, mumps, rubella (MMR)?

Once you have these answers, you'll know if they are truly concerned about mRNA being new or if it's something else.

Scientists have been working on them for decades, they are fine. Your risk of dying or getting injuries from not getting the vaccines is way, way higher.

Why, are they OK with other vaccines?

Listening to an antivaxxer is a mistake - every time.

The risks of any specific vaccine must be judged against the risk of actually getting whatever disease. If the vaccines for whatever disease were as/more likely to fuck you up than the disease, then there wouldn't be any point, and they wouldn't get approved.

The fear for some is because of how fast tracked the mrna vaccine was, but mrna research by any means is not new. The idea has been in the air for decades and saw very limited trials when the Ebola outbreak happened, but due to it not spreading, there was no need to mass create mrna vaccines at the time at a commercial/global scale.

I listened to a podcast 2 years ago that explained the history of covid/vaccines and where covid came from. I really wish I could remember what it was called but it was fantastic, I sent it to my family members who were anti-vax

No on the contrary, mRNA is really brilliant, in my very limited understanding, instead of injecting you with a weakened disease, you get the learning process against it instead. This is actually a lot safer than other types of vaccine, and many times safer than getting the virus without having the vaccine.

I live in Denmark, and Denmark chose to use mRNA exclusively because they are both the safest and provide the best protection, Denmark is also one of the countries that have had fewest problems with COVID in the world, because we have very high rate of mRNA vaccinated people.

So you don't have to experiment yourself, it's already been done on a massive scale, and the result is clear.

Your body creates and uses RNA all the time. If there was a problem it would show up nearly instantly. Anything else is something all vaccines do, so we can look to smallpox vaccines which are more than 200 years old for those effects. If there is anything else life itself wouldn't be possible as RNA is critical to how life functions.

Unless the friend has training as a microbiologist or something similar their belief is inconsequential. And even then they would be in the vast minority in their field (like a geologist that believes oil doesn't come from the heat and compression of ancient organic matter).

A lot of people are afraid of new things they don't understand. The hope is that people realize that the fear is irrational and listen to experts in the relevant field.

The approved mRNA vaccines went through the same approval process as any vaccine. And once approved, they are monitored for safety like any other vaccine. Between pre-approval testing and post-approval monitoring, we would have detected any issues. So the proof is in the pudding — lots of countries have approved them and none have found risks that are worse than the disease they protect against (currently only COVID but there are more mRNA vaccines in the works).

There's also no reason to fear the way they work. Other vaccines introduce antigens (molecules that your body doesn't like and produces antibodies to attack) in various ways — sometimes with a weakend virus, sometimes with a dead virus, sometimes just the antigens themselves. mRNA is just another way to introduce antigens so your body learns to fight them. For a little while your body follows the instructions in the mRNA to produce the antigens, and then your body learns to attack those antigens. It's not all that different from the way other vaccines work. mRNA breaks down pretty quickly in your body so it's not even in your system for very long, and there's no mechanism in the body for mRNA to produce lasting changes. So it's a lot like you got a cold: for a little while the cold makes your body produce molecules, then your body fights it all off, and then in the end there's no permanent change except your body learned to fight off that particular antigen.

The logical issue your friend is ignoring is that the disease (covid) is proven to be highly dangerous. The vaccine might be slightly dangerous (depending on who you believe). But clearly there are no remotely credible claims of hordes of people dropping dead of mRNA vaccines like there are for covid. So just from a lesser risk stand point, your friend should get the vaccine.