>If not, how do we know that they're generally safe after only a few months of testing?
Afair mRNA and DNA based vaccines are being studied since about 1999 without ever finding side effects that stem from the method itself.
The way it works is actually safer than "traditional" vaccination via dead pathogens, mostly because only a tiny and harmless part of the actual pathogen is used.
The testing is done mainly to make sure that it actually works and the "harmless" bit is actually harmless...
So while a Phase 3 trial is still sensible to make sure that all assumptuions hold, I would argue that the expected side effects of these kind of vaccines are close to zero.
And honestly, even traditional vaccines have very little side effects... Neutering pathogens so that they stay neutered is a pretty well understood technique, and these new techniques basically do that on a genetic level by removing the neutered parts altogether.
That's encouraging. Traditional vaccines are well-studied and very widely deployed, so we know pretty much exactly what the side effects are and how rare they are. I wouldn't be nervous about getting a traditional vaccine, but I'm nervous about one that hasn't been deployed to people before...
Afair mRNA and DNA based vaccines are being studied since about 1999 without ever finding side effects that stem from the method itself.
The way it works is actually safer than "traditional" vaccination via dead pathogens, mostly because only a tiny and harmless part of the actual pathogen is used.
The testing is done mainly to make sure that it actually works and the "harmless" bit is actually harmless...
So while a Phase 3 trial is still sensible to make sure that all assumptuions hold, I would argue that the expected side effects of these kind of vaccines are close to zero.
And honestly, even traditional vaccines have very little side effects... Neutering pathogens so that they stay neutered is a pretty well understood technique, and these new techniques basically do that on a genetic level by removing the neutered parts altogether.