There were probably hundreds of thousands saved in even in what at the time were considered very low risk demos. It may be over 1 million (if you mutliply infection fatality rate times number of people in the 0-49 age demo, you get just over a million). And, perhaps more relevant, the vaccine probably prevented a numer of long covid cases that is a multiple of that and many times higher than the reaction this article is writing about.

It was in no way reckless. All interventions have risk. If a vacccine saves a life/prevents long term illness for 10x as many people as it hurts, it's a highly positive intervention, and the numbers for these were probably much better than 10x.

Evidence?

Recent data ( https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.33... ) suggests that any lives saved may only have been saved in the medium term;

"In the medium-term post-COVID period, the risk of death was reduced by 8% for those who had been vaccinated while in the long-term post-COVID period, the risk of death almost doubled for those who had been vaccinated. While in the medium term, there was a reduction in mortality risk for those who took two or three doses, in the long term the risk of death was greater for those who took one or two doses."