Population of us and Canada about 368m. If 1.4m have died from covid, this is a best case chance of death of 1/262 (0.38%). Using the information from Wikipedia quoted above, there was a 1.4% chance of dying from covid over the course of the pandemic. Both of these numbers are noticeably higher than the 1/5000 quoted in the article and that for hospitalization not death.
The chance of dying in childbirth, based on what I found w/ google, is 0.85/5000 and there does not seem to be an outcry to make births safer. While 1/5000 is a concern, the reduction in deaths and hopefully long covid from vaccination is less than the death rate pre vaccination. And fortunately, covid is presenting a less serious infection rate with omicron.
There is a fair number of people who aren’t (sufficiently) vaccinated. If you don’t trust mRNA vaccines, there are a number of alternatives using older vaccination technologies you can use. And omicron tailored vaccines are expected later this year.
1) Only 86 out of the 330 million Americans have been infected by COVID-19[0]
2) Over 279,000 American deaths were prevented by the COVID vaccines as of July, 2021, and obviously more since then.[1]
So, if we re-run the numbers with these changes to inputs, we get:
Number of Americans who died (or would otherwise - without vaccines - have died) from COVID-19 / Number of Americans who were infected by COVID.
This gives a case fatality rate of (1,013,651 + 279,000) / 86,693,081 = 0.014910659 ~ 15/1000
This compares to 1/5000 chance of a serious side effect is defined as requiring hospitalization, life-threatening, or life-changing, but not deaths, per-se.
So, taking pot-luck chance with COVID is 75 times more likely to cause you death than an mRNA vaccine is to cause you a serious side-effect.
[0] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/56...