No i did not have reservations about safety of the injections, i trust clinical studies. People who don't trust double blind, placebo controlled studies simply have a fundamental trust problem because well, if you don't trust those, it's really hard to trust anything at all.
I didn't think vaccines were actually necessary or would help at all because i expected the virus to spread anyway which it did, and i didn't have any specific health issues to make me afraid of the virus (and i was wrong on this, a perfectly healthy guy just a bit older than me who i knew, refused vaccine, got to intensive care with covid, and nearly died). So maybe i dodged a bullet idk.
But in any case, political considerations were main reasons why i took the vaccine - by that point, i was pretty much infuriated with hard-right propaganda and hard-right opinions prevailing everywhere around me.
>Why is it do you think that “political markers” have come to take such precedence for some people?
Because of the culture war. It's a bitch and you have to take part even if you hate the idea. Too many things people on the other end of the spectrum do, repel you too much and you need to distance yourself from them as much as possible - and they usually do it exactly for that purpose. I bet conservatives feel the same about us; it's just that - culture war.
Maybe splitting into two nearly non-intersecting societies, like they had in Netherlands (they had three! google "Pillarisation") is a good thing. They avoided strife simply by having parallel structures - schools, churches, hospitals, theatres, labour unions, and of course political parties - for each, and almost did not communicate with people outside of their group, ignoring each other. Even during WWII Resistance against Nazi occupation was pillarised - separate groups fought against Nazis while ignoring each other. They won't admit it, but pillarisation ended simply because one of the groups - social-democrats - eventually won.