The long term effects of this vaccine are going to be tested in hindsight, but not on me.
We all have to make our own risk benefit analysis. My guess (yes, it is only a guess as hard data is not available at this point) is that the prevalence and severity of vaccine side effects will be significantly lower than those of COVID. Keep in mind that COVID has life altering, long term consequences for some who survive it as well ranging from neurologic deficits to cardio myopathy. These are what we know of now, it is possible that many others will come to the surface as time goes on.
Edit: my memory is not correct. I will post correct information in a new post and leave this as is because the correct information does not materially change the conclusions (it was 10 years ago that I last looked into anthrax and smallpox vaccines, so I should have known not to trust my memory). End Edit
Historically, even really dangerous vaccines such as anthrax have far fewer adverse effects than the COVID death rate alone. The anthrax vaccine, if memory serves, had 1 severe adverse effect per 28,000 doses. This was why it was only ever given to deploying military and perhaps a few others going to biologic warfare risk areas--to cause pulmonary anthrax it must be weaponized, and cutaneous (skin) anthrax infections are not really an issue. Death, or hospitalization would be considered a sever adverse effect of a vaccine. At its current rate in the US, SARS-COV-2 would kill 560 of that 28,000, put another 5,600 to 7000 in the hospital, and cause an unknown (but greater than 560) number of permanent health problems. So, even assuming the COVID vaccine turns out to be 100 times worse than one of the nastiest vaccines I know of, it is still significantly safer than getting COVID.
This is like people who argue that not wearing a seatbelt saved a friends life, so they don't wear theirs. Yes, in a small percentage of MVAs a seat belt might actually be harmful, but the risk from not using it is significantly higher than the risk of using it. Of course, this comparison has hard data to back it up, so it is not completely applicable.
Tactical and strategic decisions have to be made off the best information available at the time. Paralysis rarely works out well, however intentionally choosing to hold a position rather than move is a valid choice. Equally, reflexively charging ahead can be disastrous. So, there is not a simple, preformulated answer to how one should act in every situation.
Personally, after hundreds of hours of research regarding COVID (based on a foundation of thousands of hours of education) and hundreds more working with COVID patients, taking the vaccine is an easy choice even though I'm far from an expert on COVID or infectious disease.
Foot notes:
-2% death rate comes from taking all deaths attributed to COVID and dividing but all positive cases in the US. This does not account for indirect deaths from COVID, being people who do not have the virous, but due to a lack of resources such as ICU beds die even though in normal times they would have survived. Excess death data suggest this number equals about 1/3 of COVID deaths.
-There is not good data on hospitalization rates, most of it comes from small samples early on. So while this number should be taken with a grain of salt, it is reasonable that for every person who dies from COVID 10 would be hospitalized, which is why I'm willing to give some credence to those numbers.
