This is the first mRNA vaccine; it cannot be measured by the same standards as a standard vaccine.

Per your first comment, see Johnson&Johnson's own website[0] for typical time periods for vaccine testing and approval. Phase 1, Preclinical stage can usually take up to 4 years, but mRNA circumvents a lot of this, and J&J did it from end of January 2020 to end of March 2020. Phase 1/2a usually takes several months to a year. I am not talking about immediate side effects that a lot of people experience, but possible, long term effects we cannot know at this point in a novel vaccine. We are getting reports of pericarditis and myocarditis emerging in otherwise healthy young males. Rare given the number of vaccines given, but so then are deaths rare to the same age group this is occurring in [1], and we've only been giving the vaccine for almost 7 months (first vaccine Dec. 14, 2020). There have been 326 deaths in 0 to 17 year olds in the US as of June 30, 2021. That's 9.939e-7 or 9.939e-5 percent based on a US population of 326m. By comparison and for perspective of risk/benefit, there were 792 deaths by pneumonia in the same age bracket in the US. Why rush to vaccinate our young and healthy, and those healthy, young people who have already had COVID?

On the positive side, mRNA vaccines take away the risk associated with making vaccines the traditional way in the handling of live virus to produce a traditional vaccine, allow for transmitting the formula electronically anywhere to be made by a suitable laboratory, and production can be sped up. I am excited by its future to fight disease and save lives, however, it's just too soon for a push to vaccinate 12 year olds given the risk/benefit analysis and the amount of data to study.

I have skin in this game, like most of us, not just improving my Google Fu or points on HN. I have older children who have been vaccinated at ages 21 and 23(even though they had COVID already in late December 2020), and younger ones (2 and 6 years old who I will not vaccinate until more data has been collected and evaluated. The mRNA COVID vaccines seem to have a wider bio-distribution than a traditional vaccine's contents do, specifically in the ovaries of women and in the bone marrow, and only time will tell what this means. It is the first of its kind, so I hardly think it can be evaluated under the same criteria as traditional vaccines. 30% profit margin on $15bn and total immunity for the vaccine companies should something go wrong per the PREP act doesn't give me confidence as a consumer of a novel vaccine. I am not an anti-vaxxer, maybe a anti-novel-vaxxer-without-sufficient-data-and-time person!

Given I am otherwise healthy (no diabetes, heart disease, obesity, or other conditions), and my entire immediate family has had COVID, I will play it safe and go with natural immunity until the vaccines have more time under their belt. I am still skeptical on why natural immunity is being pushed to the side. Try finding reputable articles and studies vs. the number of social and regulatory pressures to get vaccinated. Even when antibodies no longer show in some testing, it has been shown that the body has been prepared to deal with future COVID or SARS viruses vs. a first exposure. Natural immunity also triggers based on the entire surface of the virus, and not just the spike protein that the mRNA is engineered to, so it offers a wider response to COVID/SARS than the mRNA vaccine IMHO.

[0] https://www.jnj.com/innovation/the-5-stages-of-covid-19-vacc...

[1] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...