It’s been five years since multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been widely available and administered worldwide, and just about the worst common side effects have been a small risk of mild, self-resolving myocarditis in mRNA vaccines and an increased risk of clotting for adenoviral vector vaccines which have been either discontinued or fallen out of use.
Past those, there have been rare (~5 per million doses) cases of Guillain-Barré or anaphylaxis, but those are broadly in line with risk profiles for other vaccines.
Despite repeated insistence from chronically-online nutjobs, the sky has not fallen, and the well-known, well-published, and well-studied risks of these vaccines remain drastically lower than the risks of actually contracting the disease they inhibit. Which is the whole goddamn point.
Now multiply that by how many people got it, and you see the number is not small at all.
Note: I have been vaxed myself.
Now consider that these risks are well-known, well-publicized, well-studied, and well-accepted and nobody is getting arrested for talking about them.
Now consider that these risks are—again—fully in-line with the risks from other vaccines.
Now consider that the number of hospitalizations in the U.S. from Tylenol annually suggests something north of 7,000 adverse effects per million people.
There are a gazillion and one reasonable things one can find to be mad about these days. COVID-19 vaccine adverse events aren’t one of them.