No shit. Does someone need to explain to the author what a vaccine is?

It's more nuanced than that. Vaccinated people who get breakthrough infections don't end up in the hospital.

...why the relentless vaccine "hard-sell" and the irrational opposition to any questions regarding it's safety?

Because the questions regarding its safety don't seem well-intentioned at all and the safety has been proven in clinical trials. Its also about risk management - getting covid is basically a lot more dangerous right now, for anyone and everyone, that any side effect that can happen.

Any links to the trials?

Why is it someone else's burden to do your basic research for you?

You're making the more outlandish claim -- that safety hasn't been proven -- and the burden is on you to produce your contrarian evidence.

Obviously you can't and won't do that if you're being contrary due to lack of evidence rather than abundance of it.

FYI the person you're responding to hasn't made any claim whatsoever.

There is evidence that the vaccines are not safe, but that is not my question. My question is why the "hard-sell" and blanket rejection of ANY contrary views.

The blanket rejection is not at all the way you're characterizing it.

The vaccines were assumed unsafe until many thousands of people had received them.

The thing people are rejecting is your rejection of the sound science that went into proving the safety of the vaccines.

At this point, hundreds of millions have taken them and they're still proving themselves to be safe.

If you have evidence, cite it. You don't have any good evidence, which is why you haven't done that yet.

I do not understand why you were greyed out because you make a real point. I have decided to forego AstraZeneca myself due to the reports of deaths, I will wait until my country makes Pfizer or others available (I am not anti-vax by any means).

I think there are many financial interests and psychological phenomena going on behind this intolerance to vaccine skepticism: people are afraid of COVID-19 and do not want to hear any possibility that the vaccines will not bring them immediate safety from this horror, along with not wanting to be "wrong" on this debate.

I am jumping from a plane but I will not wear a parachute until someone proves to me it will not give me a skin rash!

If the common narrative was that you should jump from a plane, apparently you would do so without stopping to question it for yourself.

"As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute."

https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459

Do you want to volunteer for the study?

That's great. I expected it to have been published on April 1.

btw, myocarditis, hemi-paralysis, and stroke-like responses are, imo, a little more serious than a rash... you, know, in case you happened to be looking into it for yourself

.. funny -- downvotes to this question actually reinforce the point of the question

They really don't, but I'll bite. The "relentless hard-selling" shouldn't be hard to understand when we are in the middle of a public health crisis that can be significantly mitigated through the thing that is "relentlessly" being "sold". Spreading awareness about vaccines is important, and there is enough misinformation and FUD out there that needs to be counteracted to allow people to make not just informed decisions, but decisions that are informed by facts and not nonsense.

I appreciate your reasoned response and agree with you. I would add, though, that there seems to be enough evidence that, at least for some people, that the vaccines can cause significant harm. Additionally, for many age cohorts, that risk of harm outweighs the benefits of the vaccine.