Something being designed to help people doesn't make it good. There's reason to believe vaccinating using a non-sterilizing vaccine during a pandemic exerts an evolutionary pressure on the virus that will lead to the vaccine becoming ineffective and the the virus endemic. Considering the current effectiveness of the vaccines a fully vaccinated population will be worse off than a fully recovered population (though the population that did not recover may find this rather morbid). See natural immunity vs vaccine-induced immunity research in Israel.

It's a lot harder to say how a fully vaccinated population will fare compared to a fully unvaccinated population. In the short term the unvaccinated population will certainly fare worse (more sick, more dead), but at a population level they will develop a stronger, longer lasting immunity and exert no mono-directional pressure. While in the fully vaccinated population, as long as the R0 is over 1 (which looks to be the case) the virus will be driven towards escape variants, it might not matter how many more people remain asymptomatic or how many fewer people die when new variants keep driving the pandemic forward and render the vaccines ineffective. It's population-level immunity that ends pandemics, immunity works very different on a population level than on an individual level.

Rather ironically if it turns out that this is indeed the case, then the people getting the vaccine are the "selfish" ones (protecting themselves short term from serious disease/death at the long term cost of the wider population) rather than the ones refusing the vaccine. Of course that's not entirely fair because people are doing it with the best of intentions and not out of "selfishness". I'm pointing this out more to demonstrate that things just aren't as simple as the media likes to portray it, i.e. with the non-vaccinated as the "selfish" ones.

If it turns out that vaccination campaigns do indeed do more harm to the population long-term than good (something we'll likely only know for certain after the pandemic is over or, more likely at this point, has become endemic), then medicine such as Ivermectin, even if only marginally effective at combating COVID starts to look a lot more interesting because it does not exert those same pressures on the virus.

There's several other ways the vaccines could end up hurting us in the long term, such OAS (Original Antigenic Sin) or ADE (Anti-body Dependent Enhancement), although it's looking really good on those fronts right now so I'm not worried about those.

The discourse going on at the moment on in general is really cancerous (even on HN sadly). As much as I find people who believe that there is no virus, or that vaccines are made to kill people, or following health advice from random internet sensations to be ridiculous, I find myself far more worried by the lack of intelligent discussion and the instant demonization and name-calling of anyone who asks questions that are critical of the vaccination campaigns. A large part of that I think is that the anti-vaxxers have been given so much media-attention (negative) that people assume anyone putting forward critical opinions "must be one those" and can be dismissed without notice.

No one knows what time will tell. Maybe this only has a one-in-a-thousand chance of ending up being the case. But I think it would be wise for people pushing for mandates to think about how society will look back at the COVID19 pandemic in say 50 years, if it turns out that the vaccination campaigns had a net-negative long-term effect. Is that really a risk we are willing to take? My take is that it would be wise to keep safe in any way we can: mask up, disinfect, get sun, keep fit, socialize responsibly, etc. And to avoid radical action before the science is settled, and vaccine mandates are radical. Science has a long history of settling on wrong for a while before getting it right, let's give it some time.