Good for you that you've never really needed a flu shot, White Rocket.
My original intention behind the question was -- I suppose most people don't really have any strong hatred towards the flu shot. Even if they may not bother to get one in the fall / winter for themselves, I don't really think they'd hate the flu vaccine with as much hatred as some might towards the COVID vaccine.
The "leap of faith" would then be -- if you are not antagonistic towards the flu vaccine, then bearing in mind that around the world there must have been at least 3 - 4B doses of the mRNA vaccines already administered by now (since 7.8B doses in total among all the different vaccines have been given so far), is there really a need to be super concerned about the safety of something that has been used as frequently as the mRNA COVID vaccines? With as big a "user base" as we already have now, I think it is pretty safe to say that we have already seen most (all?) of the different possible side effects that we can see. And if there are still new side effects that we haven't seen yet, the chances of getting it is literally 1 in 3 to 4 billion!
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Originally Posted by white rocket
So are you saying that if I have no fear of the flu shot doing any damage then I should feel the exact same way about the COVID vaccines?
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I like Westopher's way of putting it -- we don't know how planes work, but we trust the engineers enough to take them. In the vaccine's case, I trust our medical scientists enough, and I trust the widespread public usage + the actual results that I can see enough to believe that the COVID vaccines we have access to are both safe and effective.
And if you have read some of my previous posts in this thread, you will see that I absolutely do not believe in the China-made Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines. Studies by HKU have found Sinovac receipients to have some very, very low counts of antiviral bodies -- the proper name has just slipped my mind now -- in their bloodstream. And countries like Chile who had a very high vaccination rate using Chinese vaccines in the earlier stages were still seeing high transmission rates.
I'd like to think that I am approaching this in a sensible and logical manner.