The authorizations for these vaccines had 10+ hour public meetings and hundreds of pages of supporting documentation. The studies listed the known data on side

The authorizations for these vaccines had 10+ hour public meetings and hundreds of pages of supporting documentation. The studies listed the known data on side effects. Obviously the vaccines were not without risk, and when the government said they were "safe" that did not mean they were 100% safe... Nothing is. They were safe to the standards of other vaccines in broad use. I will acknowledge that in addition to the known deaths from JNJ, I'm sure there were a bunch of unlucky people who had reactions to vaccine that caused issues or may have even killed a few people who were extra sensitive or unlucky. However if the choice is either getting the vaccine first or getting COVID first, and one is 100x safer than the other one for all of these side effects, then it's still hard to disagree with anything the government did. And at the end of the day a lot of anti-vaxxers or vax-curious people argue in bad faith with bad data (I'm not saying you are, but it is common). And even I agree that the "good" data isn't perfect. We still have reporting issues of died with COVID vs died from COVID, but even with any reasonable assumptions about these distinctions the vaccines give all people of any age enough additional protection to be worth it (for the initial 3 doses at least - I make no claims beyond that).