I am my own fandom

Hm I'm hungry

Forgets about it

Everything Is Bad. I'm gonna attack someone. Shut up. Die

Hm I'm hungry

[Eats something] oh shit I'm cured

I've been wanting to write something about this, so I thank you for this question!! I am confident in the vaccine, and will be getting it as soon as I'm allowed. I have done my research, spoken to physicians within my family who have also done their research, and am happy to say that a lot of the fears people have are unfounded. Let's get into it!

Was the vaccine rushed?

No. It was prioritized. The Covid vaccines, to receive approval, have undergone all of the same trials, rules, testing, and processes as every other vaccine. No corners were cut. Over 45k were used in human trials. The reason most vaccines take a number of years is because a) availability of persons with said illness for testing, b) availability of persons willing to undergo human trials, c) resource availability (scientists work on a number of things), and d) funding. The covid vaccines could move faster than usual through these barriers, for obvious reasons, leading to quicker outcomes.

Pfizers history? Likelihood that they faked their data?

They have had a number of lawsuits against them throughout their existence as a company (best known for Chapstick, Advil, and Prep), most involving undisclosed side effects in medications they have produced. Some involving unapproved human trials. Vaccines are, of course, different from medications. However, the Covid vaccine has undergone extensive external review and has been found valid and safe.

Wall Street Journal - FDA review confirms safety and efficacy of Pfizer coronavirus vaccine

Medical Xpress - Pfizer vaccine results published in peer-reviewed journal

The New Daily - FDA publishes first peer-reviewed report on Pfizer trial as Britain rolls out COVID vaccine

The New York Times - Pfizer’s Vaccine Offers Strong Protection After First Dose

BBC News - Safety data on Pfizer jab released by US

Vaccine long term side effects?

This is hard to say! However, the nature of how the vaccine works leads to minimal concern about long term side effects. To quote a physician I'm related to when I asked him about it, "I imagine the worst it could do would be....not work for someone, so that they still get Covid." Let's jump to the next question to see why that is.

Dangerous materials in it?

Vaccines train the immune system to recognize the disease-causing part of a virus. Traditionally, this means they contain either weakened viruses or purified signature proteins of the virus.

But an mRNA vaccine is different, because rather than having the viral protein injected, a person receives genetic material – mRNA – that encodes the viral protein. Think of it like instructions to make a fake shell of the virus. When these genetic instructions are injected into the upper arm, the muscle cells translate them to make the viral protein directly in the body. Your body creates the fake shell, which looks like the virus.

This approach mimics what the SARS-CoV-2 does in nature – but the vaccine mRNA codes only for the critical fragment of the viral protein. This gives the immune system a preview of what the real virus looks like without causing disease. This preview gives the immune system time to design powerful antibodies that can neutralize the real virus if the individual is ever infected. In conclusion, your body creates a dummy virus uniform with no virus inside of it. Your immune system then learns how to defeat it, without risk of harm. That way if it ever runs into the real virus, it sees the shell and knows how to effectively attack.

While this synthetic mRNA is genetic material, it cannot be transmitted to the next generation! This means your body won't continue creating fake shells. After an mRNA injection, this molecule guides the protein production inside the muscle cells, which reaches peak levels for 24 to 48 hours and can last for a few more days. So essentially, you create fake shells for a few days, then you stop. It doesn't keep going forever, which I know some folks were concerned about.

Conclusion:

It is a trustworthy, worthwhile vaccine. If you don't want to go first, that's alright! It will be first responders, essential workers, and folks in long term care facilities who will receive it this year and early next. But I do encourage everyone to take it if they are at all optioned to.

Both companies had already been working on mRNA vaccines for years. The cool thing about mRNA vaccines is that you have a generic mRNA vaccine structure, and then you can add genetic material from whatever virus you want and make a vaccine for that virus. So basically they already had a vaccine backbone ready to go, something along the lines of “start-making-protein-from-((INSERT VIRAL PROTEIN SEQUENCE HERE))-okay-protein-complete-now-stop.”

Once they got the genetic sequence of the coronavirus, all they had to do was basically copy and paste in the right part of the sequence to make a protein from its outer shell. (Viral genomes are very small, and we know a lot about what each part does from previous coronaviruses like SARS, so scientists already knew which parts of genome to use) For Moderna, the entire process after they received the coronavirus genome took two days. For Pfizer, it was probably something similar.

So it’s not that the companies have been fiddling around in a lab trying to make a good vaccine for half the year, then did trials in the last few months. The vaccine development took pretty much no time, and then the companies spent ten months doing trials.

The cool thing about this is, the next time there’s a novel viral disease, scientists will be able to copy and paste a sequence from that virus into the same type of backbone and start doing vaccine trials for the new disease really quickly too.

So if mRNA vaccines are so useful, and if both companies had been working on them for a while, why haven’t we had an mRNA vaccine before? Basically, the trial process for vaccines for other diseases has been much slower. Which brings me to my next point--I want to elaborate a little on what OP said about how they were able to do the clinical trials so quickly.

Clinical trials report data when a certain number of participants have reached the endpoints determined at the beginning of a trial--often developing a disease or other adverse outcome. This can be a really slow process, especially for drugs that treat things like atherosclerosis or cancer or dementia--diseases that take years to progress. For clinical trials involving contagious diseases that cause symptoms quickly, what typically slows down the trials is how likely a person in the trial is to catch that disease. So there have been mRNA vaccines in the works for rare viral diseases like Marburg virus, but trials will be pretty slow because not that many people catch Marburg in a given year.

For Covid, on the other hand, the pandemic is wildly out of control in much of the world, so the rate at which participants were exposed and got Covid was really high. Once a certain number of participants (decided at the beginning of the trial) got Covid, the companies were then able to look at the data and see how many of the people who got Covid received the vaccine, and how many got the placebo. For Pfizer, 170 people got Covid. 162 of them had received the placebo. If Covid was more under control, it would have taken longer for 170 people to get Covid, and the trial would have been slower. (For Moderna, 95 people got Covid. 90 of them had received the placebo.)

The Benign Violation Theory of humor, which is probably the best one out there, suggests that something is perceived as funny when it is simultaneously perceived as violating how the world “should” work and as benign. Something like the “gun” meme, for example, is funny because it violates our sense of how a joke should progress, and at the same time it’s harmless. 

Racist/sexist/etc shock humor violates our sense of how the world work–in either a “that’s not true!” or “you’re not allowed to say that!” way–and therefore whether you find it funny is based on whether you find it benign, which is to say either you think it’s harmless or you don’t care about the people it harms. (This is the root of the punch up/kick down distinction–jokes that punch up are funnier than jokes that kick down because the people they target are less vulnerable and therefore less likely to experience harm.)