The cool thing about medicine is that we get pretty good numbers pretty fast for everything. So in the end that choice would just be about knowing the numbers and picking your poison.
But that isn't how people make these choices. They will say "it is unnatural to stick a needle into a child" and then have their child infect half of their school plus the parents with measels.
The cost/benefit analysis of that hypothetical case is a damn no-brainer for the vaccination, yet that isn't how people act. Meaning if we talk about regular vaccinations (flu, corona, measels, tetanus) just getting all of them is the better choice for the society and yourself.
Unless those are crazy expensive for some reason in your place. Where I live all of those are free and take at max 20 minutes for me to get including the walk to the doctor's office. Not having the flu in the winter season is cool, because lying in bed for a week sucks more than a little sting of the needle with no noticable side effects.
I think it is a reasonable point of view to not want to be the testbed for vaccines that were also rushed to the market to reap the profits, let me remind you.
Oh and, I've gotten the vaccine. I'm just not tribal about it.
Given the biological mechanism of these vaccines, the risks are well-known at this point. The mRNA does not integrate into DNA and degrades within hours to days. We were extremely lucky we had years of science on the mechanisms when the pandemic broke out (+won the scientist who did it a Nobel price). The major serious (but rare) side effects are (1) myocarditis in young men with mRNA vaccines and (2) thrombosis with adenovirus-based vaccines. Both were either known already or identified quickly because of the mentioned huge number of doses given and the careful monitoring then. These risks are measurable, have clear incidence rates, and are lower than the same complications from infection (otherwise millions would have had them).
There is no plausible mechanism for any delayed catastrophic effects years down the line without any signal in the first billions of doses, neither for this vaccine nor for others. At this stage the vaccines are not exactly what I would call "experimental" anymore. They one of the most heavily observed medical interventions in history.
So if you believe there ought to be something wrong with the numbers (incompetence/grand conspiracy) or some weird thing is gonna happens with a delay of multiple years (black swan mechanism), the burden of proof IMO on your side.
I am not from the US, so I might not be up to speed with the tribal pandemic conflicts emerging in your culture. So you may call me tribal, but I prefer to mitigate real risks for my family and me, rather than hypothetical ones proposed by people who don't go into detail beyond a "who knows".
For anyone that isn't afraid of needles and a little arm pain, it's worth it for the peace of mind alone.
This is just wrong. Go figure out which vaccines you haven't had, and then figure out why they haven't been prescribed to you. (Hint: It's not because your doctors are anti-vax)
Decisions that take you in opposite directions.
