According to the Federal Government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, there are

569,294 adverse event reports associated with COVID-19 vaccination in the US, with a total of 2,433,730 symptoms reported.

Also reported is that

391 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been given in the US to 185 million people. It’s estimated about 56% of the population is fully vaccinated.

Among the adverse events/symptoms reported are some 34,589 folks getting the Wuhan Virus after having been vaccinated.

What’s carefully omitted from “journalist” reporting of these outcomes is their context—the specific relationship between the numbers of these events/symptoms and the numbers of vaccinated.

Adverse events work out to 0.14% of doses administered, and total symptoms represent 0.6% of doses administered.

Those 56% of Americans who are fully vaccinated are 184,852,416 Americans. Even if we take those 570,000 adverse events and 2.4 million symptoms as being solely allocated to fully vaccinated (which is a boundary value, not the actual distribution of events/symptoms), those per centages work out to 0.3% and 1.3% of fully vaccinated, respectively.

Those extremely tiny rates of uncomfortable-to-bad outcomes are in line with, if not smaller than, the rates of uncomfortable-to-bad outcomes for other vaccines and antibiotics that are routinely prescribed.

Now consider those 34,000 infections despite having been vaccinated. Assuming the boundary condition of those infections occurring despite having been fully vaccinated, that works out to a 99.98% effectiveness of the vaccines. Compare that rate with the rates on which the vaccines were, sort of, approved by the FDA: 95% for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna two-dose vaccines, and 65% for the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccines.

It’s also becoming increasingly established that vaccinated folks who get the Wuhan Virus infection experience weaker symptoms, have lower hospitalization rates, and are even less likely to die than those who are unvaccinated and catch the virus.

With a lethality rate for the unvaccinated of less than a half per cent for healthy folks younger than ~65 and in the 2-5% range for those older, folks should weigh the likelihood of an uncomfortable-to-bad outcome and decide. Folks of any age with one or more comorbidities should weigh very seriously the relative odds.

Especially given the weaker symptoms after vaccination, I still recommend it, even though the vaccine only improves already highly favorable odds: it’s no fun being sick.