What is an mRNA vaccine? One that instructs the human host cell to make isolated viral proteins (not the whole virus just a surface protein!) so the immune system learns about it and will be ready in future.

How do we know the vaccine is safe? “Safe” is a relative term in medicine because sleeping, paracetamol, and driving isn’t even safe yet we do such things frequently. However rates of adverse events have been extremely low

Because vaccines work by provoking an immune response - and we know the vaccine does, and in a time scale less than 6 months - we would expect adverse events to be within this time frame.

RNA is broken down very fast in the body and certainly isn’t going to be there in ten years time.

How come mRNA vaccines have never been licensed in humans of they’re safe? Well actually plenty of trials have shown that they are safe. Indeed drugs and vaccines have to be shown they are safe before they are proved effective! Ethics rules 101.

But what this does mean, is because it is a medical treatment like any other, outside of a study, the risk of the disease has to be greater than the risk of the vaccine or existing treatment.

We haven’t needed an mRNA vaccine ever before! We already have vaccines for a lot of problematic human diseases so it’s quite hard to make the ethical and financial case for mRNA vaccines. In fact because they don’t even inject the pathogen itself, they’re pretty safe!

Why has it been so fast? So the main issue with a lot of drug development is actually funding and committed and ethics and business cases and getting the right people in the same place and time to review them. Actual data collection is usually shorter and quick to analyse.

Compare the amount of planning for a wedding versus the day itself...but come covid everyone is obsessed, getting emergency funding, priority review and emergency ethics approval and like whole continent resources thrown at one company

There is no way on God’s green earth the FDA and other drug licensing companies are going to license something where evidence is the vaccine is riskier than the disease.

The vaccine is only 90% effective. Well most childhood vaccines are 85-95% effective. Flu is like 40-60% effective. TB vaccine was 60-70%. 90% is great!

The vaccine might not reduce transmission, just symptoms. Just like flu vaccine then! I’d rather get mild covid than fatal covid.

I’m young and don’t have much risk of dying from covid. Firstly, long covid sounds rubbish. And you can still give it it all your loved ones. The more people get the vaccine, the less people get symptoms, the less hospital fills up.

1500 people currently ventilated out of 4000 intensive care beds. Congratulations, your chance of getting a ventilator after having a car crash, asthma, operation, sepsis or major blood loss from childbirth, has magically reduced by more than a 1/3. And that’s with lockdown!

So. As an intensive care medic, I will be getting the vaccine because a) I don’t want “long covid” b) I want to protect my family c) I’m heartily tired of seeing people with no medical conditions go into multi organ failure and die d) knowing it’s avoidable

e) 8/10 floors of hospital full of covid wards f) having to cancel operations due to no beds g) wanting to explore exotic places without having to worry what covid care is like on safari h) contributing to exterminating covid before it mutates into something worse...