In the US, ~160,000 people over the age of 85 have died while 216 people under the age of 18 have died. Covid represents a proportion of deaths from all causes of 13.5% for 85+ and 0.58% under 18. The trend in between the age group extremes continues in an expected way.

You can't make the same decisions about risks when you have one side so skewed by age. There is absolutely no guarantee that side effects from vaccination would be a preferable risk for younger populations or that vaccination side effects would have comparable age-related effects.

Covid response isn't a religion, it's not "we have to do everything" or "we shouldn't do anything", responses need reason not gut reactions.

0.58% is an order of magnitude higher then 30 out of 17 million. Going by these numbers, AZ is still better than COVID. And I doubt any worse than other vaccines.

That is an incorrect statistical comparison.

It is 0.58% of all deaths being caused by covid. As in 994 out of 1000 people under 18 died in the same period from other things.

Compared to people who are alive covid killed 0.000288% (or 1 in 350,000) under 18s.

30 in 17M is too few to have a reliable statistic, but that comes out to 1 in 567,000.

If that holds, is age invariant, etc. etc. and ignoring the time-based nature of the covid deaths, taking that vaccine would represent a *50%* increase in death risk for under 18s, which is just absurdly high. (it doesn't matter that that 50% isn't exactly right, anything remotely close is an unacceptable risk)

Statistics is hard.

How is 1/350,000 a LOWER risk than 1/567,000? I don't get it.

One metric is the ratio of COVID deaths / total deaths the other is COVID deaths / total population.

Since everyone is expected to get the vaccine, it's not fair to compare COVID deaths / total deaths to vaccine deaths / total population, you need to compare COVID deaths / total population to vaccine deaths / total population.

In this case, assuming the numbers posted are remotely accurate, then this specific vaccine could end up being far more dangerous to people under 18 years of age compared to getting COVID and waiting it out for two weeks.

We don't know and I'm not asserting one way or another. I'm just saying that making comparisons is much more difficult and nuanced than the straightforward naiive approach.

They are relatively close, enough so that unknowns may change the equation. Are there more unknowns for covid in young people, or more unknowns from the vaccines?

(I'm not commenting on how to solve this equation, just pointing out other factors)

Wouldn't taking the 1 in 567,000 risk eliminate the 1 in 350,000 risk. Vaccine risk and disease risks don't stack. But I could be mistaken, statistics is hard you know.

~200 people in this age bracket in the US already died. If you gave everyone in that age bracket this particular vaccine an additional ~100 might die. They stack, they don't negate, those 200 people already died.

If the covid risk was flat over time, if you offered this vaccine yearly (quite possibly necessary) then you'd be saving ~90 lives in this age bracket per year. 10 would still die of covid, 100 would die from the vaccine, 90 whom would have died of covid would would instead survive.

It would be "better" depending on how you think about better. Telling people to throw away huge chunks of their lives to protect against a risk that you turn around and tell them they need to take a risky vaccine that's only half as bad... it isn't necessarily a good line. Especially because pandemic diseases tend to lower in their negative outcomes at time goes on, the vaccine will probably stay the same while the risk it prevents will get less and less threatening.

All of this based on statistics and assumptions that have a lot of uncertainty in them.

The bottom line is that in order to be a good idea, a vaccine needs to be much safer than the disease it prevents. Half as risky doesn't meet this mark; AZ would be fine for the oldest age bracket because the risk profile wouldn't change much, but the youngest age bracket there is a significant comparison between the two (and perhaps further unknown risks which haven't surfaced)

But you cannot stack people that died, past tense, with people that might die from something else. The best comparison would be comparing people that might die from blood clots against additional people that might die from COVID.

Neither of us was doing that so far. Case mortality seems to be the best basis, adjusted maybe for overall risk of infection when everything is opened up and nobody is using masks anymore. At which point any comparison most likely degenerated into guess work.

The main difference so is that vaccinations reduce the overall risk for the population. And we didn't even talk about severe long term effects of COVID.

That being said, we live with a lot of medications that have severe side effects in the 1/100,000 plus bracket without breaking a sweat.

By the way, I don't see how you come to the conclusion that the AZ vaccine is in any way riskier than COVID.

fwiw about current state of play: in the US and most EU countries no vaccine is even approved for those under 18.

The challenge with COVID as always is that the risk of death is correlated across the population. So a 25 yo having COVID increases the odds that he dies and that everyone around him dies. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Yes, but those are different people that might be killed, which makes it an ethical dilemma.

Depending on the type of adverse reaction, it might be safer for young people to not get vaccinated at all or with a different vaccine. (For example if the adverse reaction affects mostly young people, while COVID affects mostly older people.)

Thats why everyone should be free to chose to get vaccinated. It is not fair to transfer the disease risk from old/risk groups to (longterm) side-effect risks for young/healthy people

It's a little cold, but the rollout targeting old people first helps a lot with de-risking. It reminds me of the group of people over 60 who worked on containing the Fukushima reactor. That was more altruistic and would only happen in some cultures, but it's a similar net outcome.

> Thats why everyone should be free to chose to get vaccinated.

Isn't that the case? At least in my country, there is no obligation to take the vaccine, and even incentives (e.g. being able to attend public events sooner) are seen very critically.

There are definitely people with the view that they should be mandatory and I've personally started to encounter social pressure to get vaccinated, which I don't want to do, because I lead a low-contact hermit's life and the odds of dying from COVID which I probably won't catch if I maintain my lifestyle a few more months appears to be lower than the chance I'll die from a vaccine that I definitely get

For my age cohort the chance of death from either is infinitesimal but because of Bayes it might make sense to continue to avoid both, but if I try to explain that to my peers they might think I'm a Trump supporter, and as everyone knows, Trump supporters should be shunned from polite society (especially since the "insurrection"), so I see this as a choice between social excommunication and a questionable injection I don't want

Fun times

I’m curious as to why you find the injection questionable? From my understanding, all of the vaccines approved in the US followed the same path every other vaccine follows. The difference was that Covid is everywhere, so stage 3 went really quickly, where it could normally take many months or years for the requisite amount of people to catch the disease in question.

To me, these vaccines have been as rigorously tested as they could be, and none of this was really ever about people in your health category anyways, so that seems irrelevant in the “utility of vaccination” argument.

I could be incorrect though, so I’m interested in your unease and rejection of what I find to be sound science.

For what it’s worth, the vaccines have been released under Emergency Use Authorization, not the normal approval process. The EUA still requires safety data etc.. but isn’t as rigorous as the full process. Here’s a decent write up: https://theconversation.com/what-are-emergency-use-authoriza...

Not that guy, but I'll give you one viewpoint.

>To me, these vaccines have been as rigorously tested as they could be

Not for me. The fact is, the vaccines have been pushed through faster than any vaccine before. Anything foreign entering the body should be tested and based on solid evidence. Doesn't matter if it's an artificial heart, stent, prosthetic, or a biological agent like a vaccine. If decades of medical research shows determining a vaccine's safety takes years because of ethical protocols, then it takes years. The present vaccination campaigns are performing more comprehensive stage 3 trials on the general population because the risks are deemed acceptable. As other people have said in this thread, a person under the age of 18 is 50% more likely to die of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine complications than from SARS-CoV-2. The risk isn't worth it at this time.

Additionally, the technologies being used for the vaccines is still deemed experimental, specifically the mRNA ones. No mRNA vaccines have been deployed before, but now it's being deployed on the general population without public knowledge of any potential risks of this unproven technology ("unproven" meaning lacking a prior real-world deployment effort; a rocket engine is only proven when it flies, not in simulation). One risk with the mRNA vaccines is that they need to be kept extremely cold to preserve the mRNA sequences [1]. If the dose warms, good mRNA sequences break down into junk mRNA, which for all intents and purposes are random nucleotide chains. That ties into an above point: no rational person wants random mRNA pieces put into their body. Again, while all risk is relative, for my age group, the risk is not enough.

If you're well-versed in the science, I recommend reading this complaint [2] filed with the EU regarding Pfizer trial safety.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-mrna-vaccine-s...

[2] https://2020news.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Wodarg_Yeadon...

> The risk isn't worth it at this time.

This pandemic was never about the risk to this cohort that continues to be brought up. The point is that taking the vaccines reduces deaths. In places where these vaccines have been deployed widely, you cannot refute that statement. Just because the people who are dying don’t look like you does not diminish the utility of the vaccine.

I’m so tired of hearing that young people shouldn’t take the risk of vaccines because the risk to them of the virus is less. That is not why anyone at all is urging you to get the vaccine, or why we did any of this at all for a year.

A society is built on mutual trust and actions and speech like this shatter it; the selfish arguments seem to know no bounds in this pandemic. I did not sit in my damned house for a year because I was afraid for my own safety!

Furthermore, The article linked claims PCR testing isn’t good enough for efficacy and from what I understood had nothing to do with safety at all. In fact, the title of that submission includes “... REGARDING CONFIRMATION OF EFFICACY” and no mention of safety, but maybe I’m not “well-versed in science” enough to understand it. Thank you for talking down to me though, we would not want me to leave this conversation with a sense of self worth.

It seems to me like you’re unintentionally spreading disinformation. I assume you don’t want to be doing that, so you should probably check your priors here, as they seem to be outdated.

It is impossible to study the long-term effects of any vaccine within a year. Impossible. Unless you are elderly or immunocompromised you are almost certainly exposing yourself to more personal risk by being vaccinated.

Assuming your odds of catching COVID is 1 in 1,000 that’s still a higher risk for any adult age group than the vaccines. I doubt your risk of catching covid is actually that low.

More importantly it’s not just about avoiding death, a bad case of COVID is terrible even if you survive. On top of this you reduce the risk of spreading it to someone else.

vaccines aren't only about your safety

They're firstly about one's safety and the rest is a bonus.

I don't agree. Vaccines are about group immunity. The disease is pretty harmless to young people. We are vaccinated them to stop the pandemic in general.

People in the UK are pushing for a vaccine passport that people will need to be allowed into venues or travel. Here's a story from today about BA introducing a passport to travel - BBC News - Covid-19: British Airways plans app-based travel pass https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56392570

No one is forcing you to get the vax. I would have personally taken the Moderna vax months before the FDA approved it because I was following the research closely.

Ha if only this were true. UK companies are requiring employees have the vaccine and ba is requiring the vaccine to travel.

I'm curious, were you able to find specific numbers for any of the studies done for regulatory approval? The raw data showing how many people got the drug, how many had side effects, and how this compares to normal rates?

I haven't had any luck with that. I assume these numbers are what the FDA is looking at. Possible side effects are documented in the packaging for a drug, but that doesn't qualify the risk without numbers. I'd prefer to know this for any drug I'd consider using. I find it strange that this data is so hard to find.

I ask because it sounds like you went pretty deep in the vaccine you mentioned, maybe you bumped into this.

The raw data is proprietary and the analyzed data summary is available on the FDA website.

I have no idea what OP means when he says “following it closely” as that’s impossible beyond press releases.

Agreed, and the same argument can be applied _against_ lockdowns (meaning measures such as mandatory stay-at-home orders that go beyond usual NPIs). I think it is slowly emerging that hard lockdowns have done more harm than good. There is no zero risk in life.

There's a big difference here though - when it comes to a vaccine, we have hard stats to define the risk/reward ratio.

I believe it's likely that lockdowns may cause some deaths, or possibly even lots of deaths. However, they certainly help prevent the spread of deadly disease too and hence prevent many deaths. We can probably get fairly definite numbers on how many deaths lockdown prevents in a large population. I don't think we can get similar numbers on how many they cause. My gut says they probably prevent a lot more than they cause, but I'd like to see any studies on this, if anyone has a link to share.

> What are you basing your claim about lockdown causing death on?

It's pretty obvious there's a profound psychological, developmental (children), and economic toll of lockdowns.

For anyone that's below 60 or so, it's very clear they've got net negative effects on their life from draconian across the board measures that go on this long.

edit: wow immediately flagged? Is it verboten to mention the simple fact of economic trade-offs in any decision we make?

I'm not even saying that lockdowns are bad, I'm saying that they have profound consequences that can't be brushed away or ignored.

The fact that so many are reticent to even admit that is why I think it's so important to mention it.

I agree with you. There is a lot of fear around this topic, so I assume rather than engage with on the merits people may be downvoting you in defence of their emotions.

It probably depends where you are located. There are some less developed countries countries that jumped the gun on hard lockdowns without any sort of care infrastructure I which people have died due to inability to get food or care for births.

For a source https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...

I don’t attempt to extend that to more developed countries however. And I can’t say they things wouldn’t be worse if they hadn’t locked down, but according to a family I know in Uganda, they were locked down before they had even one case. I haven’t done the research on whether that is true or not so take it or leave it.

Fair question. In a sense, the evidence for vaccines is upfront, while the evidence for lockdowns required the careful accumulation of data. I would cite for instance the paper by Ioannidis and co-authors [0].

"In summary, we fail to find strong evidence supporting a role for more restrictive NPIs in the control of COVID in early 2020. We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures.

The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures. More targeted public health interventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures."

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484

It may not affect your main point, but a caution: The paper has received critique [1], including a letter to the editor

[1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/3D81CAC483C2021C00E27C8826D...

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13518

As we have learned over the last year, doing a cost benefit analysis on anything related to covid is the equivalent of drowning your grandmother in a bathtub.

And not just financial costs, but quality of life costs. One to two years of restrictions, quarantine, and/or lockdown is a sizeable fraction of everyone's lives.

I feel bad for people in countries where people are even restricted from being outdoors, despite hearing again and again that outdoors is the safest place to be.

In EU at least plenty of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are still incoming, so there are actually alternatives to AZ.

Do not forget that these vaccines are still very new, plus there's the possibility of a production issue with the AZ vaccine that affects only part of the production; I wouldn't say it's "politically-motivated" or a dumb idea to pause AZ vaccinations until one does a deeper investigation; I personally chose to avoid AZ due to a history of strokes in my family, I preferred to reserve a spot on the Moderna list. Better safe than sorry.

It's the trolly problem. Pull the lever and kill one person. Don't pull the lever and kill 3 people. I'm a lever puller.

Only it isn't that simple.

Pull the lever, and the lever might do things you didn't expect - like derail the last few cars. Don't pull the lever, and people die for sure.

If you derail the last car and don't try to put it back before the next train, you now suddenly have more folks that don't trust the lever and avoid all trains, not just the one you operate.

But the real risk here is that the lever will get stuck. Even if 1 person dies from vaccine - it can create huge, long-lasting case against vaccination, causing more people to choose not to vaccinate and eventually killing a lot more people.

There must be no doubts with vaccines, 100% trust in them is essential.

> There must be no doubts with vaccines, 100% trust in them is essential.

Completely unrealistic. Everything in life has associated risks, and vaccines do carry a (small) risk.

It would be better to educate people about understanding and balancing relative risks rather than sensationalising a few outliers. The main fault here lies with the lack of proper rational discussion in the media.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the great.

We're not doing great at all at vaccine acceptance...

>It's the trolly problem. Pull the lever and kill one person. Don't pull the lever and kill 3 people. I'm a lever puller.

people are such cool "lever pullers" until that one person is themselves.

Why put people that are at low risk from covid at risk by giving them a vaccine?

Because it reduces transmissibility.

Really? Do you want to link the evidence suggesting that?

Really? We have over 200 years of vaccine use in public health programmes to control contagious disease. The most effective medical treatment humanity has ever devised. That has completely eliminated some of the most transmissible and debilitating diseases on the planet. Go and read a book on the subject, it's not like it's secret arcane knowledge. Reducing transmissibility is a basic (and bloody obvious) consequence of acquired immunity. If a vaccinated individual is reinfected, then compared to an unvaccinated individual the time to eliminate the virus is greatly reduced and the window of transmissibility is greatly reduced.

The current absence of smallpox.

Ummmm....we can wait and get another vaccine? The vaccine is done on HEALTHY people, we're not talking about meds on terminal stage cancer patients with nothing to lose.

You can also just expose yourself to the virus and build immunity that way. Up to you.

THat works great if you don't die.

That doesn't work so great if you don't die and have lifelong complications, though. It doesn't work so great if you get it and kill your child/grandmother either.

It doesn't work so well if you have to catch the virus multiple times to have immunity either (folks aren't always immune after catching it). Not to mention the unknowns with mutations of the virus.

It is seriously much better to try to avoid catching the virus at all. The virus means you might be ok... or you might die, or you might have a lifetime of suffering that you wouldn't get with a vaccine.

You can calculate the risk for yourself, based on data from the UK:

https://qcovid.org/Calculation

eg. 30 year old healthy white male: 1 in 7,092 risk of hospitalisation, 1 in 250,000 risk of death.

By contrast the risk of death from anything for a 30 year old male in the UK is 1 in 1,215:

http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html

Even taking a healthy 80 year old male, the risk of death from COVID is 1 in 275, whereas the annual risk of death from anything is 1 in 15.

You also need to bear in mind that it's much more subtle than the "risk of death". If you're vaccinated, the symptoms and complications are greatly reduced even in younger age groups. So a small risk is reduced to a tiny risk.

But it's not just about the risk to the individual. It's about the risk to the population as a whole. Both of these risks need to be balanced.

While the vaccine might not /appear/ to be worth it at a young age, by getting vaccinated and blocking the transmission of the virus you are protecting the population at large. From that perspective, not getting vaccinated is actually very selfish (using the exact meaning of the word).

People need to look at both the personal and societal aspects of the vaccination strategy. There will be social pressure to be vaccinated because it's not just about you, it's about everyone, and if we are to reopen society and get back to normal, then the expectation is that nearly all of us will need to get vaccinated.

I thought this bullshit was done with months ago?

- Death is not the only bad outcome. Many otherwise healthy younger people have experienced months of debilitating sickness, in addition to weeks of the worst flu you've ever had.

- You can pass it on to people less fortunate than yourself, who can't take weeks off work, and (in some countries) may not have health insurance, and might be at higher risk of death or morbidity.

- You're burdening a stretched health system, literally preventing other people (or even yourself) from getting life saving treatment.

- You're stopping me and everyone else from going to the pub.

As others have said, there is more risk than just death. I don't really want more of a chance to have a poor quality of life for the rest of my life.

The vaccine greatly reduces the chances that I have any of these things. Or heck, it even greatly reduces the chance that I'll have a week or two of misery.

I bet the risks for flu are even lower than that and I still get the vaccine every year like clockwork. Because having the disease sucks and can leave you with long-term sequelae.

The fact that we have insufficiently tested vaccines does make the decision harder.

Nope. They are options, like quarantine, masks, different vaccines. It's not "this vaccine right now or death."

The most sensible thing is to investigate this, maybe more without the vaccine died from thrombosis, but need to see.

Ummmm... I already have been vaccinated and it feels amazing not having a fear of death over me. Guess what. I'm going on vacation to a beach in a few weeks because you know, science.

I hope not, but those can be famous last words. Even if AZ works as marketed, it's no where near 100%. Then we have different strains

Nothing is going to ever be 100% safe. Live your life how you want, but I'm personally fine with a little risk and live a more fulfilling life with more life experiences. I ride a motorcycle. It's defiantly not safe, but I've had so many great memories on it that I am fine with the risk.

Plenty of motorcyclists forget to keep the rubber side down, get hurt, then continue riding after recuperating from injuries.

Still, the consequences for those unfortunate riders can stay with them throughout life.

Ride safe.

I rode my motorcycle to the burger shack, unvaccinated, without a helmet, where I doublfisted cheeseburgers and had a large chocolate shake. Life is for living indeed.

What you said about different strains has never been more than click-bait and conjecture. Please stopping spreading this, people are scared enough already. This is not how t-cell immunity and coronaviruses work [0].

From an article titled "Lab studies suggest Pfizer, Moderna vaccines can protect against coronavirus variant" I quote:

"While the blood serum samples produced less neutralizing antibody activity, it was still enough to neutralize the virus, they wrote in a letter to the journal. This is in line with other studies. And it's well within what is seen with other viruses, one of the researchers said." [1]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=covid+immunity+from+other+co...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/health/pfizer-vaccine-south-a...

If you have a well functioning immune system the vaccine should likely impart an advantage over no immunity and you have a good chance of fighting off the SARS quicker than without vaccination or immunity.

The problem however is those with weak immune systems. In these cases, the vaccine is unlikely to help these people much, and they become breeding grounds for escape variants.

It's like taking a quarter dose of an antibiotic, against an infection of an organism that tends to mutate at a high rate. This places a large pressure on the organism for an escape variant.

This is exactly what Bossche warns of. Listen to minute 37 onward: https://www.brighteon.com/257797f0-06fa-4596-be69-af71bb3adc...

I'm not sure why you brought up immunocompromised people. Does that have anything to do with the video you linked? Seems like a wash, they are immunocompromised and anything they catch will have time to live and mutate in them, not just covid19. Maybe this is something separate we should set aside? Or I don't understand the relevance.

I watched enough of the video you sent to see what Dr. Bosche was saying - that vaccination immunity is more specific than natural immunity, and that may present problems down the road with variants. I also found this note/presentation/slides by him [0]. I read some of this to get more detail, video is kind of lame for relating so much information. I'm not a virologist. But I have read a bunch of this stuff. I thought what Dr. Bosche said was interesting. I had a few initial questions. I'd love to see more virologist's opinions on this.

He says "Covid-19, a highly mutable virus, only needs to add another few mutations in its receptor-binding domain". I didn't know that covid19 was considered highly mutable, like the flu. Is he hedging here, saying this might happen? I guess the specific proteins that the vaccines target would need to mutate. I wonder how likely this is. I assume there are lots of things that are "several mutations" away from killing us all. Papers I've seen early on said that left to its own covid19 had a 50/50 chance of mutating to become no more deaadly than the common cold (because it would spread better that way), or settle into something that flares up every few years, like a bad flu season. I took that to mean that there are also pressures to mutate to something less deadly. They think this is what may have happened in 1873 (if memory serves), a new coronavirus came on the scene, it looked like a very bad flu season at the time.

He mentioned several cases of young people dying from covid19 variants, and several cases of people shedding variants. "Several" is not a large number, especially considering how much we don't understand about the immune system. Typhoid Mary was shedding for years, and that had nothing to do with a vaccine. I don't know that I'd consider his several examples to be anything out of the ordinary out of a sample size of how many tens of millions.

He seems to be saying we'd be better off if we didn't proceed with vaccinations and allowed the population to reach natural herd immunity at this point, since covid19 has already spread to so many people. That people who caught it and got better on their own would be better protected. This reminds me of the virologist early on who recommended finding the least deadly variant and spreading that around on purpose.

It's an interesting topic, and I appreciate you bringing it up! I don't mean to argue over it, so much as relay my thoughts and left some of the details of what he's saying.

Do you think most of the people fearful of variants are on the same page with this guy? The news stories I see mentioning problems with vaccines and variants don't ever seem to have solid sources/studies backing them up, I've never heard this guy mentioned before, and he seems to be a relatively lone voice at this point. I'd like to think that the experts have had a chance to hash all this out amongst themselves, but I know things don't always work out that nicely.

[0] https://www.deblauwetijger.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Ge...

Is that obvious? If you have the choice between self quarantining and trying to avoid contracting a virus that, if contracted, has a low percentage of killing you, vs choosing to get a vaccine that also has a low percentage of killing you, why would you choose the vaccine?

Because one "low" is few orders of magnitude lower than other "low".

Right, but that's assuming you get the virus; to properly compare it you have to factor the chance you contract the virus in the first place. I'm not saying the math works out better, I haven't done it myself, but I'd bet most people would choose to try to avoid contracting

Yeah, I'm willing to avoid contracting the virus... by getting the vaccine, which certainly isn't as deadly as the virus has been. It isn't just the kill rate, though: I truly want to avoid the long-term complications that some folks are getting. I'll avoid the suffering that comes with the virus too, even without the complications.

most people in my experience are fed up of trying to avoid contracting and would rather the much lower risk of vaccine (bare in mind 10+m people have received this vaccine in the UK with no known issues)

I think probability of contracting the virus eventually is highest of all the factors involved and ultimately is not that far from 1.

Maybe because one probability is significantly lower than the other. Maybe because you just can't self quarantine because you cannot work from home. Maybe because you need to take care of other family members and don't want to put them at risk.

There's a lot of good reasons for choosing a vaccine even if the risk isn't strictly zero. And you also need to remember that receiving vaccination isn't mandatory. If you personally aren't comfortable with the risks you don't have to get vaccinated.

This makes me skeptical of the suspension, but I'm not an export on these matters and haven't done enough research to claim to have done my due diligence, so I'll refrain from either advocating for or against this step.

No, it's not like saying that