I'm so glad we have this thread, because so many of you have such interesting and informative things to add.
Personally I've never been afraid of vaccines. If anyone else here is my age or more, (I'm 63), then we can all look at our big round smallpox scar on our upper arm and be grateful that smallpox was eradicated. I don't remember getting that shot, but I do remember as a young girl I drank some pink concoction which turned out to be the Sabin polio vaccine. Smallpox is gone and polio is much less common in America. None of us spent our childhood in an iron lung. Mump, measles, rubella etc....vaccines. This is another vaccine. It is here to save the day.
As
@dmac55 said, it is Astra-Zeneca, not J&J, which has components from chimps. Astra-Zeneca is not approved here in America.
As
@ilovewings said, the mRNA technology has been worked on for a decade by scientists toiling away in obscurity. It was brought to the forefront as Covid ravaged the world. It's another medical advance and only seems "rushed" because the general public was unaware of the work that had been going on, and also because so many scientists around the globe focused their work on a singular disease at the same time. The notion that schools would forbid teachers who are vaccinated to come to school is medieval thinking.
As
@MrX mentioned that it is unlikely we would have a vaccine passport, we do have one in NY, called the Excelsior Pass. There are plenty of people who don't want it as they are afraid of tracking, and I'm a bit squeamish about that as well, but it's voluntary.
So, IMO MOO JMO---
@anonymiss, you mentioned people you know who have had bad short term effects. I only wish that my friends who died, drowned lungs gasping on ventilators, no family allowed, no funeral after, could have suffered a day or two of fever, chills, headache, muscle ache and then arisen from a sickbed instead of a deathbed.
I imagine all the plagues in history, The Black Death, Plague of Justinian, all of them. Hundreds of millions dead when the world population was much lower. They didn't know about germs, bacteria, and fleas and unwashed hands. When the occasional doctor, like Lister, came to understand these things they were treated like crackpots. Dr. Snow in London actually had to have a pump handle broken because people kept dying of cholera from filthy water. We are educated people now. No one wants to be the literal one in a million who dies from J&J but neither do we want to be the one who dies in a car accident on the way to get it, which is far more likely. If ancient people, dying of bacterial infections, could have understood that hygiene would have saved them, they may have shunned it anyway. Hygiene was difficult to achieve without running water in a home. We owe a debt to those who came before us. If Fleming hadn't accidentally left the cover off a Petri dish, maybe we wouldn't have antibiotics.
My grandfather died of tuberculosis when my father was three. He's 88 now and still feels the pain of growing up with no father. if only there had been the TB tine back then.
I believe future generations will look back on mRNA as another miracle step in public health.
Finally, I haven't changed my ways much. I'm not ready, especially to eat indoors or go on a plane. But I feel MUCH safer.
As @jjenny said, you may want to reconsider because of the Delta variant. If your family is not vaccinated, they too are vulnerable despite having had it.
