Right. The WHO listed 'vaccine hesitancy' as one of the top global health threats, and that was in mid 2019, before the pandemic. [0] On the other hand, vaccine side-effects have never been a major health threat.
Delayed side effects is a thing, especially due to interaction with other meds. Huge swaths of americans have hypertension and diabetes and take meds regularly.
I am no expert at all, or from a medical field. But my understanding is, that long term effects of vaccines are effects that last for a long time, and not effects that tale a long time to manifest.
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.
I think this vaccine and vaccines in general are overwhelmingly safe, but has this not been a slightly different situation?
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.