> Long Covid symptoms are most likely caused by Covid (even if barely symptomatic from the initial infection! - example: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/health/long-covid-asympto...).
> Vaccine side effects are most likely not the vaccine, but stress, hospital restrictions, lockdowns, prior infections, less exercise, bad diet, etc.
Not really a consistent baseline or set of controls there.
Nobody says this. Vaccine side effects are of course the vaccine, by definition. Stop obfuscating what you really mean, which is "an enormously broad range of symptoms present in people who took the vaccine, and also many who did not, which no serious medical professional will attribute completely to a vaccination."
But even if I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you mean that: It's perfectly consistent if you believe that COVID is poorly-understood and mutating, and the vaccines are well-understood and consistent over time. Which are both true.
Odd that no matter what side of that coin people argue, they forget it applies equally to the other side too.
When people say things like "not a high risk group for covid" it's shorthand for "not at immediate risk of serious respiratory covid symptoms should they contract the virus." It doesn't say anything about longer-term impacts (nor, confusingly for some people I guess, transmission); for that you need, well, studies like this. (But without the antivax scam noise around it.)