I deeply appreciate your thoughtful response here.

I don't disagree with your points on bad actors either. It should be noted that my positive test in Feb 21 was digitally recorded, reported to the state of Colorado as well as my county health department, and I was then contacted by them. I also have the email from the lab company. My point is that, like the EU, taking people's "word for it" is not a good way to do things, as you said.

I have no doubt my natural immunity will wane. Certainly my free antibodies will, and it's an open question as to how long t-cell memory remains. In fact, there are many countries investigating having people like me be able to go straight to getting booster shots.

One thing that I think is important when it comes to trust, and my family's experience:

My comments from May/June are a lot more hopeful, and optimistic. At the time, I was told my mother-in-law's death was reported to VAERS. I now know it wasn't. I don't think it was deliberate, but I've pulled the flat files for the system twice since August. There is no record of a woman her age in Nebraska with anything remotely like what happened to her. (Sudden cardiac arrest and death aren't hard to spot in that system, and I work with data as a professional all day. I even used Spacy to analyze the dataset to ensure I wasn't going crazy. I was in shock when I realized the hospital forgot to put her in the system.). I investigated this, and it turns out that there is no carrot, and no stick with VAERS. The hospital in Omaha where she died probably was overwhelmed with COVID patients, and they just forgot to put it in. It takes 30 minutes on a shitty website to enter the record in.
The end result: I thought somebody was going to investigate what happened to her. I thought we would get some explanation. I WANTED them to tell us that there was an air bubble in the needle, and the vaccine itself wasn't the culprit. I wanted some kind of explanation. Unfortunately, nothing was ever done. No follow up. Nothing. It's been soul crushing for us.

I pinned all my hopes for some kind of research on a friend of mine, Adam, who is a pretty prominent coder in the ML space. (I won't say his last name, but he was one of the early founders of a well-known name in the machine learning space). Adam suffered an event very similar to my mother-in-law's, but because of his younger age, survived. Also due to his young age, there was a much bigger interest in researching his incident. A team from the Mayo Clinic began working his case. He was kind enough to get them to start to look at my mother-in-law. We thought we were going to get answers. Unfortunately, in August, the team at the Mayo Clinic "ghosted" (his words, not mine) him. As part of the agreement to collect multiple samples of heart tissue from him, he had required he be included in any pre-prints produced by the team. They stopped replying to any of his communications in August. His exact words to me when we spoke on the phone in September: "They are sweeping this under the rug."
It should be noted that the damage to his heart is permanent. He's in his mid-30s. He can't even hike anymore.

Our further conversations have reached a the following conclusion:
The funding for the Mayo team, for the MRNA vaccine, all come from the same source. This source is treating it like a friendly-fire incident. In the midst of the most massive public health campaign in history, there is no benefit to learning what happened to him or my MIL. Any answer will only undermine that goal. Like a lung cancer researcher funded by Big Tobacco, or a medical cannabis researcher funded by the Feds, questions that potentially lead to inconvenient answers are crushed before they can yield answers that might conflict with the goals of the funding organization.