Do you realize how horrible it is to disseminate conspiracy theories that you heard from a "friend" who heard it from "a doctor"?

You're part of the problem.

Noted.

The executive summary of the FDA report[1] on the vaccine lists observed side effects in the clinical trial population as well as their incidence rates. Briefly, it is comparable to a normal flu shot.

Derek Lowe, who's worked as a chemist doing drug discovery for 30 years (for whatever that experience is worth to you), wrote an article[2] talking about that report and gives his take on the question of safety.

He's also written an article[3] about how it's likely people will wrongly attribute things that would have happened anyway to having taken the vaccine.

For a techie analogy: Have you ever been roped into doing some computer support for a friend or family member? Fixing a printer, installing a driver, cleaning malware, etc.? Have you ever experienced someone you helped coming back to you the next week blaming you for some new issue that's cropped up because "It must have been you when you worked on it last week!", even though it's because they went to some scummy website or similar? The vaccine rollout is going to be that scenario times a billion.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download [2] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/09/th... [3] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/04/ge...

"High risk" for a vaccine is still a lower risk than that of catching/suffering/dieing from covid. It is a numbers game, a balance between risks. It isn't a magic pill to stop evil in its tracks.

I completely agree -- but what I'd like to understand is what those risks are from the vaccine. In Canada, the risk from COVID is high, but not as high as that in the US.