It is helpful to consider the four prior coronaviruses that are in widespread circulation among humans.

They are believed to have causes pandemics when they first crossed over into humans, but like SARS-CoV-2 they caused very little death in children even though children are easily infected. Once someone caught them and survived, that person had some immunity. Immunity against reinfection fades, but immunity against serious illness lasts longer.

So what happened with them is that you got a terrible pandemic that did a number on adults but while widely infecting children didn't harm them much. People who caught it and survived would get reinfected as their immunity against infection faded, but would not get seriously ill, so the pandemic would eventually end with everyone eventually having been infected, and the virus regularly in circulation. Everyone gets infected every year or so, for the most part getting only mildly ill at worst.

Children born after this point all catch these viruses when they are young. They don't yet have any immunity, but these viruses only very rarely cause serious illnesses in children. They then get reinfected every year or so just like adults, but now they have the immunity against serious illness too so remain fine when they get older.

Now, hundreds of years after those viruses crossed over and caused their pandemics they are so routine that we generally don't specifically track them and don't even have a specific name for the illnesses they cause. We just lump the illness in with the illnesses caused by several other respiratory viruses and call it the "common cold". Those four coronaviruses are responsible for about 20% of the common colds in the US.

It looks like SARS-CoV-2 is heading toward becoming another common cold virus. Look at infection rates, hospitalization rates, and death rates by age group (US, through May 2021, rates per 100k):

Age Infect Hosp Death
0-17 37k 287 0.5
18-49 44k 1100 25
50-64 32k 2600 85
65+ 22k 5200 1140

Children get it, but very rarely die from it. For comparison, the death rate for children 0-12 per year in car accidents is a little over 1.3 per 100k. For kids, COVID is about as risky as taking about 50% more car trips.

If it is indeed heading down the path of the other four then it is extremely likely that you will get COVID-19 at some point, despite living in a rural area. Vaccination makes it so that when you do get your first COVID-19 infection, it will almost certainly act more like a second or third infection. Without vaccination, you go into that first infection with your immune system totally unprepared.

As far as the risks of vaccination go, yes, there is a lot we don't know about how the body works. (Ask me sometime about the mysterious lump that showed up on my ass one day, baffled all the doctors that looked at it, and a few years later just went away on its own).

But we do know a lot about vaccination in general. We've been doing that a long time. For all vaccinations so far if there was going to be a side effect it showed up within something like 6 months.

For new vaccines for new diseases the things that go into them are all things that have been well tested before, except for whatever is specific to the new disease. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, that new thing is the mRNA, but mRNA is broken down in cells in a few days.

All the COVID-19 vaccines in use in the US and Europe have been given to enough people long enough ago that we can be confident that if there are any side effect that we do not yet know about it is because they are extremely rare rather than because they take longer to develop.

Bottom line: Waiting it out perhaps made sense when it seemed like there was a chance we could eradicate SARS-CoV-2, but too many people were not willing to do what that it would have taken to do that. With it heading toward becoming the fifth common cold coronavirus that is no longer the case. Get vaccinated with one of the vaccines that has been widely deployed for at least six months.