>I'm unsure how they get the number of people needed to vaccinate to save one life as 16000.

It's statistics. They calculated the NNTV (number needed to vaccinate) to save one life as between 9,000 and 50,000 with a 95% confidence interval. The point estimate (or best guess) between those two numbers based on the data set is 16,000.

>One should assume that like the seasonal flu that nearly everyone including those that have been infected will eventually get it with a fatality rate that cannot reasonably be fully predicted by looking at prior data because the virus will mutate and get better or worse and treatments may get better as well.

The point of the study is NOT to make assumptions like this. There are studies hinting that a large percentage of the population may be immune to COVID because of previous infection with unrelated coronaviruses. There are too many unknowns to make broad assumptions like "everyone will be infected". The study is based on real-world data and absolute risk reduction, not relative risk reduction. This same relative risk reduction fallacy is how we arrived at the highly marketed "95% efficacy rate", which is turning out to be false. There are many problems with the real-world data itself... not surprisingly problems that erroneously favor vaccination over therapeutics, but it's the best we have to work with.

>This also doesn't fully cover the decrease in lifespan from damage sustained by people who aren't immediately killed.

Nor does it address the decrease in lifespan from dosing 100% of the population with pathogenic spike proteins from the original Wuhan strain from the injections, versus letting the virus naturally become less lethal and more contagious. Nor does it address the very real risk of pathogenic priming/ADE, or that the mass vaccinations during an ongoing pandemic could force dangerous mutations in COVID that would not have occurred naturally.

>It's entirely possible that we can vaccinate and eradicate or suffer from multiple waves that ultimately kill a few million in the shorter term and potentially a lot more over the next few decades. In the long run considering the cost of not destroying covid now might only require 100 vaccinations per life saved.

There's no data I'm aware of that suggest these mRNA vaccinations will "eradicate" COVID. They are incredibly leaky. From the study:

"In the Israeli field study, 4460 persons in the vaccination group became infected during the study period and nine persons died, translating into an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.2% in the vaccination group. In the control group, 6100 became infected and 32 died, resulting in an IFR of 0.5%, which is within the range found by a review [11]."

If you read the source Israeli study on google scholar, the control and vaccinated groups were equal, at a little over 500k people each, yet the number infected in each group was roughly the same.

The fatality rate was reduced by a bit more than half in the vaccinated group. These vaccines aren't going to "eradicate" COVID based on this data, not by a long shot. What the data does show is that 41 people died of COVID out of over 1 million people in the study, vaccinated or unvaccinated. What that indicates is that we are epically overreacting.

There is evidence to suggest that the virus is mutating around the Wuhan strain vaccinations, however. When you prime the immune system of the majority of people exactly the same way with a leaky vaccine, the chances of a new strain emerging that escapes immunity is far higher than if you let peoples' natural immunity deal with different strains of the virus as they emerge. This is a well known fact in virology and epidemiological circles that we ignore at our own peril. What we are doing with vaccines is, in fact, extremely dangerous, and when you factor in that the real-world threat of COVID is mild based on the data, it's lunacy.