>well reasoned skepticism would come naturally for technical professionals.

It's not well-reasoned skepticism to question the safety of a vaccine for which every vaccine adverse event reporting database reports two orders of magnitude more adverse events than previous vaccines? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z would you call Nature an anti-vax journal?

That is one comparison that should be made. The more important one is to compare having covid versus having the vaccine, the outcomes and the outcomes of you get covid while vaccinated.

The "having COVID versus having the vaccine" comparison doesn't make sense because the vaccines do little to prevent infection (and may even be increasing the odds with more recent strains). So the risks are cumulative, not mutually exclusive.

Healthy well reasoned skepticism is exactly what leads to "anti-(COVID)-vax sentiment", because the data is not good.

If you doubt that, just browse this thread with showdead turned on. The people pointing out that the vaccines could be causing this are all being killed. Probably this comment will be gone within minutes. Yet those comments are also providing evidence and citations. Meanwhile, the "pro-vax" comments are all like yours: merely wishing away people who disagree with no arguments or evidence.

So which side is truly the one with the appreciation for science and reason?

Hundreds of thousands of people are dead from vaccine refusal in the US and meanwhile on you talk about an appreciation for science and reason.

You really don't know that at all. Public health makes claims like that, but they distort data and lie with wild abandon, nothing they say can be taken at face value. Even if it were true, exchanging hundreds of thousands of deaths for millions of injuries so severe people can't work anymore is by no means an obvious trade, let alone one that should be forced on people.