Given the incident rate and the growing COVID swells in a few european countries (France and Italy especially), the slow vaccination progress, not helped by hesitance over AZ and surprising prevalence of vaccine hesitancy in general, you could just as well argue the opposite. Nations that are overcautious may lose far, far, far, far more lives thanks to covid infections than an extremely rare handful of blood clots which haven't even been tied causally to the vaccine yet. The risk reward narrative on this topic has been really bizarre so far.
What we see bow is the rare side effects, like blood clots, in the 30 in 5 million range. These effects are close to impossible to discover in clinical trials, because they are too rare. Again, nothing really unusual.
Once the body developed anti bodies and general resistance, the vaccine doesn't have any effects anymore anyway. So either side effects, also in conjunction with other meds, manifest right after vaccination or they don't at all.
Causation hasn't been proved and cannot be assumed.
It makes little sense to worry about this for AZ, it's a very standard viral vector vaccine.
The brand new mRNA family of vaccines however are untested in the long-term...
Admittedly, I don't know much about vaccine safety, but isn't it unusual to have a vaccine rolled out to millions of otherwise healthy people without any long-term studies into its safety? I understand we create new flu vaccines yearly, but my understanding is that's a slight variant of previous flu vaccines which have been proven to be safe over long periods of time – and it's only rolled out to vulnerable people who want it, not everyone under threat of not being able to travel, etc.
I think we probably should have some level of caution when taking any new drug or vaccine – especially one that is going to be rolled out to millions of people. How many times would we need to run this experiment before a 'safe' vaccine does actually cause blood clots or some similar side effect? Or are side effects from vaccines basically impossible? (I genuinely don't know).
For some context, I'm saying this as someone who now suffers from permanent side effects after taking a medication that was once deemed safe and without risk of permanent side effects so unfortunately its hard for me not to be a little hesitant.
You seem to suggest risk-reward analysis be viewed at by the number of deaths.
Germany had to suspend vaccination (temporarily) due to legal reasons and risk of a lawsuit to the state.