It is sad that you have to defend yourself by saying “I’m not anti-vax”. Anti-vaxxers are rightly criticized for denying the overwhelming decades of evidence that the standard repertoire of vaccines is safe.
That’s totally different than questioning new, unproven vaccines, especially when no vaccine of the same type has ever been widely deployed. There are very legitimate concerns about genetic vaccines. And for vast swaths of the population, getting covid might be less risky than getting this vaccine.
I think a big one is that there is simply no long-term data available pertaining to injecting an agent that directly modifies your DNA, as opposed to triggering your body's established process to make such a change itself.
Well an mRNA vaccine isn’t supposed to directly modify your DNA. But we really don’t know enough to be sure. We don’t know all of the pathways in the body. It could very well be that mRNA floating around in your cell does have an effect on your DNA. We know that some organisms do reverse transcribe from RNA to DNA. There is no long term testing of this stuff.
It also introduces the possibility of transcription errors and such. You inject the mRNA expecting it to be synthesized into antigens but it could end up creating something else altogether. Again, we don’t have decades of testing to be sure. We’ve never injected millions of people with mRNA.
That’s totally different than questioning new, unproven vaccines, especially when no vaccine of the same type has ever been widely deployed. There are very legitimate concerns about genetic vaccines. And for vast swaths of the population, getting covid might be less risky than getting this vaccine.