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One way to quantify risk assessment around taking the vaccines:

1. Establish what you believe to be your percentage chance of having a serious case of COVID (serious meaning more than a background nuisance lasting a few days). I chose 10 per cent.

2. Pick a percentage chance of a serious side effect of a vaccine. I chose 20 per cent.

3. What do you suppose is the risk of getting COVID anyway even if vaccinated? (a serious case) — I chose five per cent.

Your non-vaccine risk is 1. above

Your vaccine risk if 2. above + 3. above

My rough estimate tells me 10% chance non-vaccinated, and 25% chance vaccinated, of having a serious outcome.

So I choose to remain unvaccinated. But I continue to monitor all trustworthy sources for information that can help me update these risk assessments. Whenever I find that 1. is less than 2 + 3, I might change my mind about that decision.

Nobody can know with absolute assurance what the right choice is, and some might have different estimates pushing them towards vaccination.

I am in that middle camp that believes that COVID is real and in a few cases dangerous, and that vaccines are neither really effective nor really harmful on a large scale, but I don’t discount the possibility that their presence in a person’s body in the future could have a bad outcome because I don’t trust the people generally behind the development of these products. I also realize I am using the word vaccine when injection is probably more accurate. These are not quite the same as the vaccines of our younger days that most of us received for polio, chicken pox, and measles among other things.