I addressed the gist of your concerns elsewhere in the thread.
There have been 2,630 deaths from COVID-19 for 18-29 year olds (never mind the suffering COVID-19 causes people in this age range) in the US. Something that causes 2,630 deaths is more risky than something causing 229 non-fatal hospital visits (the heart condition which has gotten far too much attention).
In terms of IFR vs. case fatality rate, the most comprehensive metastudy you cite, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/eci.13... estimates that we only have 1 case per 10 infections (the Lau 2021 paper which claims we only have 1 case per 50-100 infections is obviously not true in the United States, since the cumulative COVID-19 case count is over 10% of the US population; don’t put too much faith in and do not cherry pick an individual study). Assuming an IFR 10x the CFR, we have a 0.16% IFR rate, which is still orders of magnitude larger than the 0.002% rate we are seeing with people who get that non-fatal heart condition after getting the vaccine (and there’s evidence that they are more likely to get the heart condition from an actual COVID-19 infection than from a vaccine)[1]. Before you repeat the “but young people” argument, an order of magnitude more young people have died from COVID-19 than have gotten that generally non-fatal Myocarditis heart condition after being vaccinated. So we know the risk factor of getting a vaccine is lower. [2]
Critical thinking is one thing, but there are a lot of bad faith actors in the “COVID skepticism” movement. Roughly speaking, vaccines have a near-zero chance of having averse side effects, a significant chance of reducing spread of COVID-19 (I myself am still skeptical about the studies which claim vaccinated people still spread the virus to unvaccinated people, since we’re generally seeing an exponential decrease in COVID-19 cases in places where a higher percentage of people are vaccinated), and greatly reduce hospitalizations of people who get COVID-19 [3].
It’s well known that, in the US, skepticism of vaccines and public health measures, unfortunately, have a political bias, and, lo and behold, people with a “COVID denial” (deny that masks help [4], refuse to take the vaccine, refuse to avoid large indoor social gatherings, etc.) political bent are much more likely to get a case of COVID-19 significant enough to report: https://i.redd.it/4o4i7arucpj71.png
A lot of this “skepticism” I am seeing reminds me of the young earth creationist arguments which I have seen over the years; they will take any evidence for a young earth, no matter how tenuous, and pretend it’s the one truth while ignoring all of the extensive evidence for an old earth. It’s bad faith arguing; young earth creationists and anti-vaxx “skeptics” do not argue in good faith.
This bad-faith skepticism -- which usually consists of poorly researched nonsense like claiming Myocarditis is a real concern if someone gets the vaccine -- is putting people in hospitals and bad-faith skepticism is killing people. I am having to avoid certain family members because they have drunk the kool-aid and refuse to vaccinate.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...
[2] To address the “Rambo” argument that young people who do not have co-morbid conditions are unlikely to die from COVID-19, their chance of getting any adverse side effects from the vaccine is also very very low. See https://health.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2021-06-18/p...
[3] https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/5Qts7/9/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7393808/ shows that masks do help
