This makes no sense whatsoever. It just sounds smart, but it totally misses the point. Both are medications. Both are taken by healthy individuals. The comparison is sound and makes sense.

Are all medications vaccines? Are all medications used to prevent an highly transmissive disease? Are all medications designed to be administered within a short period of time? Come on it doesn't take a genius to see it's an apple to orange comparison

> Are all medications used to prevent an highly transmissive disease

We may argue this makes any rare side effect from the vaccine, which is meant to avoid a potentially serious illness, more acceptable than those from the pill.

Sure, if we have no alternatives, and the news of these side effects will not impact the rollout of other vaccines

Criminals aren't arrested for breathing. Next!

Boeing 737 max has a lower crash rate than cars, do you think the ban was warranted?

Again, that's comparing apples and oranges. Not to mention, what's the cost-adjusted safety comparison look like, given that a 737 costs more than a thousand cars!

Your whataboutism needs some work.

That's exactly my point, it's an apple to orange comparison, I've intentionally left out other dimensions of comparison and cherry picked something that's similar, which is exactly what original post was doing between contraceptive and the vaccines

Cars should also be banned and replaced with alternatives (be it safe self driving tech, public transit or biking). Car crashes are one of the top killers of young people in terms of crashes, and we’re just starting to understand the effects of air pollution on young lungs.

Or maybe stop banning things and let people make their own decisions.

If drivers were the only ones impacted, I’d agree. For example professional race car drivers have all consented to the risks, so what they do on the race track is up to them. But when cars are used for general transportation there are all kinds of negative externalities that people can’t opt out of.

Other people are always impacted by our decisions. That's just the world we live in. Damn near everything you do affects the people around you in some way.

Do the people around alcoholics consent to that?

At some point the risks/reward of various behaviors (let alone the substances that enable them, you don't see people scrambling to ban belts because people hit their kids with them) are such that legislating away things with varying degrees of state violence to back it up isn't worth the tradeoff.

In the UK 40 people standing on a sidewalk are killed by car drivers every year

In my local town a couple of months ago a car driver managed to embed their car in a house, fortunately the resident was upstairs at the time and not sitting in their living room, otherwise they would have been dead

Last week another driver hit a stone column, 3' from the road (with sidewalk between), damaging a 500 year old building and meaning the residents had to be evacuated. They're still in a hotel.

How do you propose those people make their own decisions?

What about WMDs? Where do you suggest we draw the line?