I'm also personally very unhappy about mandatory vaccination or excessive pressure, but from a different angle: I'm worried that by doing so governments are basically fueling a resistance whose root cause is based on basic sacrosanct human principles such as freedom, dignity, independence, etc, but if human psychology is such that if you're making a stand you also have to provide additional reasons, just to prove that you're still rational.

I don't think many people (if any) would publicly state "I know that vaccines are technically the most rational thing we could do given the information we have, but I'm still not going to accept them because the government is patronizing me, so screw them, I'm going to go against my interest just to stand for my rights". Most people will try to sound more reasonable than that and add that perhaps it's a bad idea in the first place, etc etc

> * Note that Moderna and Pfizer have similar clot profiles to AZ: https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/07/29/astrazeneca-covid-1...

From the linked article:

"Crucially, the study authors found that people who had been infected with COVID-19 developed blood clots at a far higher rate than those who had received either of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines."

From what I understood, the main question is: do you believe that you can avoid catching covid indefinitely.

If you really believe that you can indefinitely do extensive testing, contact tracing, social distancing, remote working (and so your partner and family) then perhaps, the probability of a vaccine complication outweighs the probability of getting covid multiplied by the probability of having some serious consequences of covid.

On the other hand, if you believe that sooner or later covid will just burn through the population, then you have to assume that you'll get it, and whatever are the problems caused by vaccines they have to be compared with covid itself.

And the comparison has to be fair!

Sure most young healthy people go through covid without serious issues. Most such people also get through vaccines without clots. The ones who do have clots induced by vaccines are more likely to have had bigger problems had they caught covid. In other words vaccines are working as intended. It's not my words; it's from the article you cited!

A few years ago I was beginning to believe in the reasonableness of the argument that most vaccines we give to our kids may be no longer necessary. The argument seemed compelling: those diseases right now seem gone and the amount of vaccine induced problems surpass the disease itself (at least until it came back).

However, I expected this logic go change once you have an actual epidemic burning through the population. Instead the same people just changed the spiel, finding new and new arguments, sowing doubt for the sake of it.

Many have lost trust in institutions because of their past misdeeds. In the same vein I also lost trust in the anti-vax rhetoric.

I think we can avoid to be trapped in a binary mindset. It's not just "with us or against us.". You can have a healthy distrust of authorities and still also recognize that there are millions of highly educated medical professionals in the world that understand the tradeoffs and are a support base for the scientific consensus that is guiding the government policies.

Yes, government will execute thinks badly again and again in many things; in particular I think it's most likely that governments will handle badly the human aspect: their inability to understand where dissent comes from and how to effectively address is quintessential politics.

But assuming that you have a smoking gun that proves that vaccines are dangerous in a pre-print study that shows how blood clots also happen in vaccinated people is just fueling FUD in this deeply asymmetric information war we're living through.

I'm personally convinced that if there was overwhelming evidence that vaccines are dangerous no amount of government intervention, or big pharma mafia, can effectively silence that. We're not even talking about one single government? If there was a hidden truth some weak link would have snapped already.

If you have better evidence I'm all ears. But please something solid.