Would you be happy for your children to receive covid-19 vaccine

The RNA based vaccines are a new technology and you can bet their long term impact will be closely monitored. However, if you understand the science of RNA, you'll know that RNA short lived and easily degraded. It should be around just long enough to trigger an immune response.

And yet the singular reason mRNA technology moved into vaccines was because with few exceptions other avenues for the use of the tech in treatments were halted at the animal testing stage because of serious side effects, too serious to even consider human trials, short lived and easily degraded though it apparently is. Enough to rattle investors. Vaccines were seen as a safer bet because of lower dosages and fewer of them, though vaccines until this pox hit were very much the poor relation as far as return on investment. To date and after over ten years of research into mRNA therapies* the only commercial product Moderna have is their Covid 19 vaccine. They're ramping up other vaccines now, but if this pox hadn't come along the chances of them having any commercial product in humans at this stage would be slim enough.

I am not saying that mRNA vaccines will cause horrible side effects, but as it stands we only have 18 months of actual data in human models to go on. Any talk of long term effects or lack of them is conjecture at the moment.

Same goes for the viral vector vaccines when it comes to covid. For a start and in very simple terms of course vaccines are protective against disease, not infection. That includes polio, measles etc vaccines. If you're immune to measles by natural immunity or vaccine and are exposed to measles you will be infected just like someone with no immunity, but that infection will be stamped out by the body before it becomes symptomatic disease. Often it will also smack the virus down so hard and fast that you have a much lesser risk of transmitting the virus to others.

Secondly covid is a coronavirus. They're nasty little bastards in many ways compared to viruses like the flu, in that they're harder for the immune system to see and fight and immunity doesn't last nearly as long. And that's before variants crop up. We need annual flu vaccines because the little buggers mutate enough to evade previous immunity. However if they didn't mutate any vaccines would last many years. Longevity of immunity and immune system memory varies with the virus concerned. EG measles gives lifetime protection, ditto for polio and chicken pox, tetanus is something like ten years IIRC. I think smallpox was around ten years too. Before covid 19 there was no vaccine against any human coronavirus and the animal coronavirus vaccines(domestic chickens IIRC?) were 50/50 in effectiveness. The world started from scratch in many ways with this pox. There had been research into a vaccine for SARS another coronavirus, but since it died out and didn't go global the interest and especially the money wasn't there to fully pursue it.

*though they have faced accusations of keeping research internal to the company.

Check out my avatar MM. I've been "on message" for a year. 😁