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> The risk of not getting the vaccine vastly outweighs any potential risk of getting the vaccine.

Read again and think a little about this statement. First, it is biased: risk of getting vaccinated is "potential", but the other risk is not denominated this way. Second, this risk comparison is obviously not true for every person.

In fact, both risks are individual and depend on several factors and weights of those factors, and those weights depend on person's values. You didn't mention data you are basing this statement on and for which combination of those factors and weights it is true.

Also, besides the risk analysis, getting the vaccine is a political decision for many people. Most people I know got it to avoid repression from state and to get preferential treatment from authorities when travelling. Other people refuse the vaccine because they don't trust the source, the evangelist and the administrator.

You can't mandate or dictate people's political stances nor medical treatments. That's a definition of totalitarian power.

> Meanwhile thousands more die from not getting the vaccine.

You meant to say some people died because they refused the vaccine and then got killed by COVID. Yes this is sad but those people died as free people.

The fact that people see getting the vaccine as a political decision is part of the problem IMO. Now that you put it like that, I suspect that one reason why uptake is relatively high here in the UK is that it's generally seen as a medical decision here, and we have much higher trust in ou medical professionals than we do in our politicians.

I think a big part of that uptake is the fact that UK has its own Astrazeneca vaccine with which Oxford was involved and this makes people in UK trust it more than people in other countries trust mRNA vaccines from the foreign big pharma and their government. The other big part of the uptake maybe the way the government and institutions behave and communicate with the public. This latter is horrible in continental Europe.

"The general public has a very hard time rationalizing and making decisions based on risk assessments. People get nervous on US commercial air carriers even though this is by all measures currently the safest form of transport in the history of transportation. Literally safer than walking down the street."

I've thought about this a lot; for me, it's not the mortality rate that bothers me the most.

It's the method of passing. Having been in a plane experiencing a serious issue it was a lot scarier because of the duration than the traffic accidents I've seen which were basically over immediately.

I think you may have a poor idea of how people die in car accidents then.

Car accidents are less instantly fatal, instead you tend to suffer for some while you bleed out, or the car slowly begins to burn as you're trapped.

Majority of fatal car crashes cause death by blunt trauma, so not much different from a plane crash.

The severity is. In a plane crash you die instantly quite often. In fatal car accident it can still take a lot of time.

Even worse in my eyes is a car accident is far less fatal... leaving huge numbers of people with a lifetime of crippling injuries.

This seems to nail it based on my experience.

At least anecdotally, the people I know that are vaccine-averse have the same fear of airplanes, etc.

It might just be the way they reason, fixating on worst-case outcome instead of a more balanced view.