I’m not sure most of the public dialogue is framed correctly. As the parent comment stated, it’s about quantifying risk. We (humans) are generally bad at thinking about risk in statistically relevant sense.
Even before that discussion can happen we need to define what is the appropriate level of non-zero acceptable risk and how to measure it. Is it more appropriate to measure in utilitarian or absolute terms?(E.g., is the risk of death to an elderly nursing home patient equivalent to the risk of death to an otherwise healthy teenager? I.e. are ‘life-years lost’ more important than lives lost?) I don’t know the answers, but only once we understand that risk can we accurately mitigate it.
Bypassing all that is just layering assumptions upon assumptions