Not sure if this is the kind of reply you're hoping for, but I've been super encouraged by the defensive stance that Scandinavian authorities took with regards

Not sure if this is the kind of reply you're hoping for, but I've been super encouraged by the defensive stance that Scandinavian authorities took with regards to the AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines once observations of rare side effects became available. These decisions were mired in a whole lot of suspicious and unnecessary controversy. Rare and specific blood clots on the order of 1 per 20,000 vaccinations turned the ethical consideration of the vaccines from "obviously good" to "obviously bad" overnight, and they were removed from the program immediately. A single-digit number of unnecessary deaths were caused, but the buck stopped there. I'm not as encouraged by the international response to this research and operative decision. It could be argued at the time that the Scandinavian decisions were made in the light of populations that had sufficiently low mortality from covid that the ethical consideration was different than in Europe at large. But to my eyes, the European decision to keep using the AZ and J&J vaccines had an air of "let's not look too closely, or maybe we'll see something bad". Norwegian case studies indicated that the rare blood clots were pretty frickin' hard to distinguish from conditions caused by common lifestyle diseases. Two cases were specifically diagnosed only because they happened in doctors who ran themselves through a battery of expensive tests few normal patients would have qualified for. My qualified guess: There are rare but deadly and persistent side effects with these vaccines, that won't be discovered in healthcare environments that aren't finely tuned. I suppose my point is that if there (God forbid) happen to exist bad but rare and non-obvious side effects of the new RNA vaccines, the truth can be uncovered. I'm not sure that a deliberate control group would be any good regardless; the AZ/J&J side effects were rare enough not to be seen in the control group. But they were still bad enough to disqualify the vaccines. The whole thing is a super interesting subject, and it's obviously so political and subject to propaganda that you'd need a very critical eye to navigate it. Unless again, heaven forbid, the effect is so bad that it's obvious. Different health authorities do have different degrees of honesty and principled handling of these questions. There are control groups available; the large population of people who decide skip vaccination.