> It had severe side effects in a lot of people.

False. The only way to reach that conclusion is by misusing/misinterpreting the VAERS data.

P.S.

> This kind of messaging is a large part of the problem, because it's trivially verify-able to be a lie, muddying the waters of wherever it should be used.

How ironic.

I'm not going to respond directly to and get into an argument with someone who accuses me of bad faith, but I offer this from ChatGPT (these statements are readily verifiable):

Most side effects were mild and short-lived (injection site pain, fatigue, headache, fever).

Severe side effects were very rare — things like myocarditis (mostly in young men, usually mild and treatable), Guillain–Barré syndrome, or blood clotting events with adenovirus vaccines.

Surveillance data (VAERS, V-Safe, EMA, etc.) show that the incidence of these severe effects was in the range of a few per hundred thousand to a few per million doses — not “a lot of people.”

By contrast, COVID-19 infection itself caused severe illness in many more people, and even increased the baseline risks of myocarditis and clotting much more than vaccines did.

So the corrected takeaway:

Saying vaccines caused severe side effects “in a lot of people” is inaccurate.

The reality is that severe vaccine side effects were rare but carefully monitored, and the risk/benefit balance strongly favored vaccination.

I'm not sure how to take your statement seriously.

Do you not consider being bed ridden for months while suffering from symptoms similar to long covid severe?

Or did you interpret my "a lot of people" as "a high percentage of people getting the vaccine"? Because I agree it wasn't a high percentage, but still _a lot of people_ nonetheless.

If neither applies, I struggle to understand how you can make that claim in good faith.