I agree with you, which is why I mentioned at the end of the article that I am not contrarian for the hell of it. I believe it’s extremely important to weigh all of the information available and to not act reflexively.
As for the available choices, given that COVID manifests as severe in only .5% of cases, the vast majority of people (especially if they’re healthy) can clearly make the choice not to get vaccinated and move through life without an issue. This statistic also appears to reflect my personal experience: over the past 18 months, my partner and almost everyone we know has either had COVID or have been exposed to it as close contacts. We know one person with pre-existing conditions who has been hospitalized (but didn’t die); everyone else is fine.
Long COVID is definitely real and an issue, and the elderly and people with underlying conditions are clearly at greater risk form the virus, but my point is that we if we’re not allowed to consider all information about the vaccine (because doing so is considered “anti-science), then we can’t make an informed cost-benefit analysis for our particular situation.
Some may weigh the risk of a novel vaccine with unknown mid-to-long term side effects that still allows infection, transmission, illness, and death and decide that it is simply not worth the risk. They should be allowed to make that determination for themselves instead of being forced to get vaccinated because they are shamed into trusting science that doesn’t deserve our trust.
Lastly, you might find this recent study in The Lancet interesting. This is the kind of information that might affect the vaccination choice of most reasonable people:
“In Israel a nosocomial outbreak was reported involving 16 healthcare workers, 23 exposed patients and two family members. The source was a fully vaccinated COVID-19 patient. The vaccination rate was 96.2% among all exposed individuals (151 healthcare workers and 97 patients). Fourteen fully vaccinated patients became severely ill or died, the two unvaccinated patients developed mild disease [[4]]. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies four of the top five counties with the highest percentage of fully vaccinated population (99.9 — 84.3%) as “high” transmission counties [[5]]. Many decisionmakers assume that the vaccinated can be excluded as a source of transmission. It appears to be grossly negligent to ignore the vaccinated population as a possible and relevant source of transmission when deciding about public health control measures.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(21)00258-1/fulltext?s=08#%20
