The thing is people 'on the other side' think exactly the same, but come to different conclusions. For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? And what do you think his chances of suffering a significant case of myocarditis or pericarditis from the vaccine is? By "significant" I mean a case that's significant enough to result in active diagnosis - in other words somebody being diagnosed after a visit to an emergency room, as opposed to passive diagnosis where you assess each vaccinated individual to find cases that would otherwise go undetected.
Obviously I'm not comparing apples to apples (side effects from vaccine vs death from COVID) but this again is as explained by your own logic. If we were having a smallpox outbreak (with some strains having upward of 30% mortality rates across all demographics), I'm not going to be concerned about side effects of vaccines short of death. But with the rather low risk profile of people in favorable health/age demographics, the side effects of vaccination become quite relevant. Another issue is that early on it became quite apparent that the vaccines were not stopping people from getting COVID, so it's not like you can really compare vaccine vs covid effects, because the reality is you're probably still going to get COVID (and repeatedly, as it turned out) regardless of vaccination status.
> For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are?
Much more likely than dying from the vaccine.
Also, and this is very important, at the time the vaccine was developed and released to the general public it was even more unknown what the fatality truly would be. We weren't totally sure as a species how the virus might mutate... maybe it would become more deadly? Maybe it would kill young people specifically even if they were otherwise healthy? Maybe by not getting the vaccine with less risk to you as the healthy 20 year old means you get COVID-19 and get "long COVID" (which I'm not sure is a real thing anyway, but I digress) and sure you didn't die but now your life sucks some.
The problem with "the other side"'s line of reasoning is that there was a specific concern with "risk" of the COVID-19 vaccine that didn't translate into practical reality and wasn't being assessed relative to the broader risk of getting COVID-19 itself or other general risks we undertake everyday.
Another way you can slice this up is, well, there's no risk of getting the vaccine, but getting sick sucks so even one day of being sick is well worth getting a shot for just to not get sick. "What about the risk" there's no real risk. If you think there's a risk, the risk is higher for getting COVID or whatever.
It all comes back to this perceived risk of COVID-19 vaccines (thank you to China, Russia, Iran, etc.) and improper assessment of risk.
Relative to getting COVID-19 there was no risk. Relative to the dumb risks people take everyday it is even less risky. The only difference is people are sitting around reading about it on social media and being stupid.
But don't you see that you're immediately resorting to the somewhat misleading arguments that I already preempted? You're engaging in the typical fallacy of vaccine OR covid. When in reality it was clear rather early on that the vaccines were not particularly effective at preventing people from getting COVID, meaning you need to look at getting the vaccine and covid, or covid alone.
And yes the risks are very real. Vaccine induced myocarditis and pericarditis rates in young males are very high, and they can result in heart failure, life long damage, early mortality, and more. And for young males you're looking at multiple significant cases per 10,000. [1] For all cases of myocarditis/pericarditis the rates would be substantially higher yet still since most cases will go undiagnosed. For some contrast, the normal rate of significant side effects in vaccines ranges in the 1:100k to 1000k range.
No, that's a straw man you made up. You very well could not have gotten COVID-19. I didn't get it for about 4 years. Well, at least a symptomatic version. But the chances of getting it were quite high, and you are still neglecting the timeframe in which decisions would have been made based on preliminary data. In other words, it wasn't get vaccine or get COVID-19. It was get the vaccine and most likely prevent getting a very severe bout of COVID-19 if you did in fact get COVID, which the vast majority of Americans did get, or something similar, including those in the age range you specified. Frankly, it seems to me that just not being sick was well worth the risk.
I'm not going to pull a number out of my hat here but I bet the number of people who were in the 19-20 year old range who died from suicide or something after losing their job from getting sick from COVID-19 and not having sick days to take is higher than the number of folks who died from the vaccine.
Even if it turned out that COVID-19 wasn't a big deal for 19/20 year olds and taking the vaccine might cause negative effects, it still doesn't mean that getting the vaccine at the time wasn't the best risk-based decision.
All in all though even if we took at face value your 1:10,000 number that still would be tangential to my original post because you're focusing on one small segment of the population and as folks get older (or younger) their risk profile changes.
What's a straw man? Following the vaccines, vaccinated people were still getting COVID and indeed dying of COVID. Early on that was disproportionately the elderly as they were who the vaccines were rolled out to first, but nonetheless it was clear that the shots were much more akin to flu shots than e.g. smallpox or polio type vaccines. This is what led to those silly things like the CDC deciding to redefine vaccine on their website to shift vaccination language away from immunity and towards a poorly define "protection" instead.
And the 1:10,000 is not my number. It is the repeatedly verified rates of significant myocarditis and pericarditis, and it's much lower once you filter it down to just younger males since the 1:10000 is for both male and female across a relatively wide age range. It's not tangential, because the entire point of our discussion is that there were rather large groups of people for whom vaccination was, at the bare minimum, an extremely debatable decision.
> rates of significant myocarditis after vaccination
Absolute straw man, deceptive and one-sided.
> Young people’s risk of developing myocarditis is higher and longer lasting after covid-19 infection than after vaccination against it, the largest study of its kind suggests.
I again don't know what you mean. Are you stating that you don't believe that the CDC chose to redefine vaccination to move away from immunity and towards "protection"? Or do you think it had nothing to do with the low efficacy of the vaccines in preventing infection?
The paper you linked to studied a much wider age group and assessed the odds of heart issues from vaccination as being about 1/3rd as high as those from infection. Their estimated rates of vaccine induced heart issues are more than an order of magnitude lower than those for the study I referenced earlier which instead was an overview of studies with more of a focus of vaccination's impact on vulnerable groups.
I'd also add that, as is typical, the study you linked to failed to assess the odds of heart issues were when one was both vaccinated and then later infected, as that is a rather more realistic scenario.
Obviously I'm not comparing apples to apples (side effects from vaccine vs death from COVID) but this again is as explained by your own logic. If we were having a smallpox outbreak (with some strains having upward of 30% mortality rates across all demographics), I'm not going to be concerned about side effects of vaccines short of death. But with the rather low risk profile of people in favorable health/age demographics, the side effects of vaccination become quite relevant. Another issue is that early on it became quite apparent that the vaccines were not stopping people from getting COVID, so it's not like you can really compare vaccine vs covid effects, because the reality is you're probably still going to get COVID (and repeatedly, as it turned out) regardless of vaccination status.