This is a dangerous message to push. The reality is that there are many lasting consequences of COVID that fall short of death but are, never the less, quite serious. The so called “long COVID” really needs to be part of the vaccine calculus because the health consequences are very much worse than the purported side effects from the vaccine.
I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon first hand when it comes to drugs. As a teenager, there was lots of anti-drug messaging trying to convince us that ecstasy was dangerous. And all of it focused on scaring kids by exaggerating the risk of death. But we could see people taking it regularly and none of them were dying. And so it undercut the message. But decades later, I know a few people who’ve had depressive episodes potentially linked to heavy ecstasy use. And that consequence was never a part of the decision-making process because the authorities discredited themselves by being unnecessarily and obviously hyperbolic.
We need better messaging that provides people with the full range of consequences for their choices. The “you’re going to die!!!” hysteria ends up being counterproductive. Even as deadly as COVID is, the truth is that unvaccinated people probably won’t die from their case…the vast majority survive. But if people understood how many recoveries included long-term health consequences that significantly affected their quality of life, they might be better able to weigh that against the potential side effects of a vaccine.