> These specific Covid vaccines are of course what I'm talking about, so reference to other things that aren't these is a non sequitur.

Nope. You're confounding your lack of knowledge with the lack of knowledge of the experts. This is a pretty usual pattern I've been seeing lately. Interestingly, both completely unknowledgeable and uneducated people and pretty smart and educated people fall for it. People make bold claims about what "we" don't know and a lot of times it's evident that it's about them. They don't know. Now, if you listen to experts (not me, I'm just a humble being who knows that he doesn't know much about this), then they'll say that they know a lot about how vaccines interact with the immune system and the body in general and what kind of side effects you can imagine. Since the vaccine is out of your body after a few days, it's, I guess, very hard to imagine a long term effect that it induces and which then stays undetected for over a year (where we are now). I know, cancer. You can always point at cancer.

> that Covid is something everyone is eventually going to get. That natural immunity, if any, is the end-game.

Again, nope. It's a false dichotomy on multiple levels. First of all, it does make lot of difference if you get it after being vaccinated (more precisely, while you do have some immunity) vs if not. Second, your natural immunity is not an end game, because covid will stay with us, just like flu, so you'll probably contract it several times. Though, if we are lucky, it's virulence will vane over time (just like it probably happened with the other 3 or 4 human coronaviruses).

> comorbidity risk and are in, say, 40s and below age brackets, the point is, especially if they are maintaining good fitness levels and lower body fat levels
> (which should have been advised for everyone if we really wanted to be honest
> about the threat and mitigations) they have a perfectly legitimate risk/reward reason to avoid the vaccine.

Well, this is again, factually wrong. Especially because of the 40s cohort. (Which, I guess, then you are a part of. Somehow most people think that the ones who are at risk are the ones who are older than them.) For the 40s cohort, the CFR is nearing 1%. Of course, it depends on your country and the health care system, but the performance of the health care system also depends on the height of the wave, the number of people who get sick (and gets hospitalized) at once. Which depends on the percentage of vaccinations. Now that 1%, or even 0.1% is several orders of magnitudes higher than the worst case estimates for serious side effects from the various vaccines. (They are not equal, of course.) Yes, we're just comparing blood clots or myocarditis (neither of which is 100% lethal) with death from COVID. (While COVID itself does cause blood clots and myocarditis and generic long covid.)

Of course, you can keep saying that I haven't proven anything. And you would be right. It's not my job. Not only, because you haven't proven anything either, but because just like you, I'm no expert. I am definitely interested in learning more (e.g. now I do follow an online virology course - super interesting), but it doesn't mean that I'll know enough to know better than the experts any time soon. And the overwhelming majority of them says that not getting vaccinated is simply stupid. The wrong decision.

All I can do is maybe induce a bit of doubt in you about your idea of trying to figure this out mostly on your own, against a large number of scientists working on all these issues related to COVID. Maybe being bit smarter than average is not enough. Maybe arguing with people who are not experts in any of these fields doesn't prove that you are right and all the experts are somehow wrong.