I agree with your concern about long-term and side-effects and other related points you’ve made. However, vaccination is a societal decision and not an individual one.
An analogy would be laws forbidding murder. You can’t make those laws optional no matter the precariousness of an individual’s position because this would allow exempted people to be dangerous to the rest of society. It is the same with vaccination. Unvaccinated people can transmit COVID and can eventually lead to mutations which can kill even vaccinated people. Thus unvaccinated people are dangerous to society and vaccination needs a threshold of buy-in to stop a pandemic.
Yes, it’s true, though highly unlikely, that side-effects could turn out to be deadlier than the disease in the long-term even for society as a whole. However societies’ medical experts have deemed the risks of vaccination to be significantly and extremely lower. As a society, we must, in general, trust the experts in their field of expertise. Not doing so leads to disintegration of society.
Imagine a widespread phenomena where students don’t trust teachers to teach, dentists to fix teeth, police to serve, firemen to put out fires, engineers to design and so on. You get a situation that is close to where the US is in now and certainly where my country is in. A big part of the problems in the US and other places is this individuality cult where individuals do not take into account community needs. I blame capitalism and the dis-empowerment of society by billionaires and corporations for this dismal situation. Feelings of community and connectedness is almost lost.
And yes, for sure I think the individual vaccination risks for some groups, especially the young (estimating a cutoff age has too many uncertainties but certainly lower than 30), may well be higher than not taking the vaccine. However, the overall risk to society and future generations is much, much lower if the disease is eradicated. Perhaps a minimum age for vaccination could be established that sets a balance between individual and community risks.
In the end the argument is based on a sense of identity. Do you think you could belong to a society and work with others to reform it or are you Mad Max seeing everyone as a competitor forever and possible enemy and looking out only for yourself and your immediate family, if that?
