For myself, I see less risk in going the route where I may not even get COVID at all and risk actually getting it, rather than having a 100% chance of injecting myself with a vaccine that I don't trust.
If you've already had COVID-19 you could argue the numbers become less clear.
Also, according to some estimates, 60-90% of people have had COVID, so I could have had it.
How can you possibly disagree with that? There is a several orders of magnitude difference. Data for the USA: there are 6,207 reports of people dying after getting the vaccine (of which only a few have a plausible causal relationship between getting the vaccine and death) [1], while there are 607,289 registered COVID-19 deaths [2] (and yes, the excess deaths do agree with that number [3]). There are exactly three confirmed vaccine deaths in the USA, from TTS due to the J&J vaccine.
> Until we know more about their long-term effects, we don't know
I agree, so we should act on basis of the data we have right now. And that data says overwhelmingly says getting a vaccine is much safer than getting COVID-19 on the short and mid long-term. There is nothing that points to that on the long term suddenly the vaccines will be worse than the virus.
> I'm in the age group that has higher risk of blood clots from the vaccines.
There is no evidence that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines increase the risk of blood cloths. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that COVID-19 does.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad... [2] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/?CDC_AA_refVal=http... [3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
These vaccines are still experimental. I am not going to take any one of them until at least they are not and companies accept liability for them.
On top of that, trying to shame people into taking the vaccines, as I see so many doing, is authoritarian. It does not lead to a good place.
This is my line in the sand against authoritarianism. It turns out that my line is against being forced to be part of an experiment. Where's yours?
You have always been responsible not only for your own safety but also for the safety of your contacts/co-workers/environment. If you think otherwise, you might want to reflect about communicable diseases/STDs/traffic/gun safety/work place safety/you name it in general and it should become glaringly obvious. Covid safety is not different. For now, the required measures are more severe but it is not true that it is a special in regard of having to look out for others.
Yet people who refuse to get vaccinated seem to have no problem making this judgement for other people that they are likely to spread COVID to, when they fall ill.
Other than that, I'm not responsible for the health of other people. They are responsible for their own health.
Unless you are living in a spacesuit, you shedding viral particles into common spaces does make you responsible for the health of other people.