Why no option to buy the vaccine?

[CorsicaDreaming]

Given so many threads about how ill people have been with the latest Covid infections, I just can't understand why the government doesn't introduce an option to buy the vaccine? Does anyone know?

This is just anti vax nonsense which has been proven wrong many times.

Whilst I disagree on it being a gene therapy, I share your concern that there are patterns starting to emerge of issues that may (and i stress the may) be tied to the vaccines, then of course there are the potential unknown long term effects, this will take decades to un-pick.

I also share your disdain of computer modelling, it is woefully inadequate at modelling with any degree of accuracy anything this complex, for a start there are too many variables, upon which there are layer upon layer of hitherto unknown (and therefore un-accounted) variables. I prefer old fashioned real world observation science.

In this pandemic far too much emphasis was put on modelling (most of which ended up being either totally wrong or with such a high confidence interval to be useless, rather than looking a real world observation of previous epidemics.

@Jbond33

It's not even a vaccine, it's gene therapy. They had to change the definition of a vaccine in 2020 to make it fit.

Gosh, no. For the vaccine to be gene therapy, it would have to alter your genetic material - ie. enter the nucleus of your cells, find your genome and change your DNA (let alone find the DNA to change). There is no possible mechanism for a vaccine to do this.

NHS is not set up to take payment. It was a mission to get chickenpox vaccine.
Don't get why pharmacies can't sell it though?

I think it's ridiculous we don't offer it whether paid or otherwise - I'd be happy to pay. In other Western countries I believe for the most part anyone can get a vaccine - Canada, USA, Spain, etc.

They won't stop you getting it, but we know that being vaccinated reduces your risk of long covid, which is no small thing. It's a serious problem and will worsen as more of us get reinfected and reinfected repeatedly. Even if you feel fine when you get it, there are masses of studies out there showing that even mild covid infections cause damage. It's a vascular illness that infects epithelial cells and can cause inflammation in your entire body, it's not a respiratory illness like flu despite many people saying it is.

But in some cases the vaccine can cause long covid type symptoms. So surely if that's the case then with each vaccine you increase your risk of that happening?
So it seems that either way its a risk. But i think people should be able to choose.
I happily had 3 vaccines. And I pay for the flu vaccine yearly. But I don't think I'll be having anymore covid ones unless something changes.
I do agree it should be available to buy for those who want to though.

Poor science i'm afraid, it's the endothelial cells that are effected by viral infection, epithelial is the skin.

Flu causes inflammation in the endothelial cells, as does the common cold. Flu however can be extremely damaging as it provokes a body wide inflammatory response, many people are left with permanent damage from flu infections.

Covid is a respiratory infection, like flu, and triggers a similar response in the immune system - the only marked difference is that covid is far more infectious, resulting in people getting it again and again in short order, whereas most people only get influenza a few times in their life.

If influenza was as infectious as covid you would see a similar pattern of long term sufferers.

This doesn't diminish the scale of the very real problem it is going to be causing - at least for our lifetimes, if it does attenuate, which it might still do future generations may not be so hard hit, but likely many of those who have long covid will suffer for the rest of their lives, which is a grim proposition.