Sometimes it's hard to know just what to make of all the numbers. When deaths are higher among the vaccinated population than among the unvaccinated it doesn't necessarily mean the vaccine is dangerous, it can mean that the vaccinated population is substantially larger than the unvaccinated and growing as a percentage. When people are divided into vaccinated and unvaccinated the simple reality is that once a large mass is reached every further move becomes ever-more significant in terms of the proportion of the population remaining unvaccinated.
For example, once you get to 95% vaccinated that means 5% are unvaccinated. When another 1% become vaccinated that means the unvaccinated population shrunk by 20% (5% down to 4%), and as such if the proportion of deaths occuring in the unvaccinated population decreased by 20% it would appear to be due to nothing more than that population shrinking by a proportionate amount (in turn this would suggest the vaccine wasn't effective, not that it was dangerous)
That said the dangers of the disease have been overstated to the point official figures are all but meaningless. When a "COVID death" means a death for any reason within 28 days of a positive test, and "hospitalized with COVID" means nothing more than "tested positive while in hospital", we can't tell how serious the virus actually is, other than that it's almost certainly less dangerous than we are told. Furthermore, to calculate mortality rates we need to know how many people died of the virus (as opposed to dying with the virus) and divide it by the people who had the virus in total. When it's clear that the virus spread across the globe far faster than we were told, even as videos suggesting the same were censored as misinformation, all we can tell is that calculation of a fraction when the numerator is far less than we were told while the denominator is potentially orders of magnitude larger than we were told is all but impossible. All we can conclude is that the probability of death from the vaccine is very small for most of us.
One simple reality is that injecting anything into the body comes with a non-zero risk. Part of the problem of mass vaccination is the notion that we are looking to achieve benefits for society as a whole even as society turns its back on the people who do suffer side effects. At a population-wide and statistical analysis level it may be acceptable to say that "1 person in a million will suffer severe side effects", but if you are that one person it takes on a totally different dynamic. It's all very well to say "for the greater good" but it's easy to see why people feel disinclined to risk being that one in a million unless they see a huge benefit for the greater good. Until there's something more than "sucks to be you" for the people who do suffer side effects it's easy to see why more people would decline to be vaccinated.
A related issue is that the existence of side effects doesn't mean something is inherently unsafe. "Safe" is a relative term, essentially meaning that the risks are considered acceptable. We get in our cars every day despite facing a non-zero risk of not surviving to reach our destination, we just regard that risk as small enough to be worth taking. In a situation like the decision whether to be vaccinated the reckoning is much the same - we have to consider the chance the virus will harm us against the chance the vaccine will harm us, and factor in societal benefits to the extent we consider appropriate. It's really no different to deciding whether to get in our cars - on a sunny afternoon we might decide to go for a drive, but might decide to stay off the road if our route goes past areas known for drunk drivers.
Personally my calculations are pretty simple. The official mortality figures for people my age, based on the original version of the virus, was in the region of 0.02%. Quite aside from the fact this is hardly a significant threat, applying some kind of fudge factor to correct for the fudged official numbers I'd expect the actual danger to be 0.002% and maybe lower (probably much lower now the latest variants are more contagious and less lethal). The best figure I found so far presenting the danger of the vaccine suggested that serious side effects had a probability of something like 0.003%. All the numbers are very small but on the basis that the vaccine appears to offer me little benefit and is at least 50% more likely to harm me than the virus is, it seems that for me the most logical decision is to decline the vaccine.
