mRNA vaccine research has been going on since 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine

with lots of money and research going into the technology, I don't understand where folks are coming from.

This already-tired argument again.

Vaccines for influenza have been around for decades. The first covid shot was the first ever mRNA technology ever approved for human use.

Now the booster doesn’t simply swap out strains. It moves from a monovalent to a bivalent (original formula plus the Omicron Ba4/Ba5 formula) and we shouldn’t test it? The first ever bivalent mRNA vaccine. Deployed to everyone on the planet. With absolutely no human testing done.

If you’re okay with it, that’s great… that’s your personal choice to trust corrupt health authorities and for-profit vaccine manufacturers. Let me know how it goes.

The ba.4/ba.5 is not the first bivalent mRNA vaccine. The ba.1 bivalent vaccine was the first, which has been studied in a larger population than the ba.4/5 bivalent vaccine.

The FDA instructed Pfizer and moderna to reformulate based on the changing variant landscape as ba.4/5 overtook ba.1

The ba.4/5 bivalent vaccine was an extremely incremental change from the ba.1 booster

You are demonstrating a failure of Bayesian reasoning. Just because something is new doesn't mean we know nothing about it.

This. (biochemist)

I can't recall seeing any human studies on mRNA vaccines before the Pfizer one, which was unblinded and the control group vaccinated after six months. I also don't understand why this was done, since there will never exist any long term high quality data because of this.

I'm pretty sure that smoking regularly (say 10-20 cigs per day) for 6 months will lead to noticeably worse health measures

It's the long-term, repeated exposure that makes smoking so dangerous.

> It is standard practice with influenza to update the stains.

A questionable one. Depending on the year, getting the influenza shot has been shown to give you negative efficacy. How nice would that be if we saw a -50% efficacy this year, wouldn't that be problematic for our strapped healthcare systems.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2017/02/studies-...

> In the 2014-15 season (when, as mentioned, the vaccine was unchanged from the year before and a drifted H3N2 strain was circulating), "negative effects of prior vaccination were pronounced and statistically significant," the researchers found. VE in those who received only the 2014-15 vaccine was estimated at 65% (95% CI, 25% to 83%), whereas VE for patients vaccinated two seasons in a row was -33% (95% CI, –78% to 1%).

Good thing we have data on the bivalent vaccine that gives us confidence that won't happen.

It's good to ask questions but you should probably ask them of someone who knows what they are talking about instead of spreading conspiracies.

How am I spreading conspiracy theories? You suggest to grandfather the covid shots on the coattails of the flu shots but are not concerned about the combined potential for negative effectiveness on future variants as seen happens some years with the flu shot and the increased infectiousness of sars-cov2 as compared to flu?

The data has already been collected and that's not the case. You aren't paying attention, you are just re-stating your debunked questions.

Are you thinking that the 2014 flu vaccines were released with the understanding that they would have negative efficacy for those who'd had the prior years vaccines? Why would they have done that?