One study, reported by the European Medicines Agency, found that the Covid vaccines caused 8.2 deaths per million vaccines. That is .0008% Another study in https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2837831, showed that Covid vaccines saved 2.5 million lives. Are those 8.2 deaths a reasonable sacrifice for saving a million lives? This is an extreme version of the ‘Trolleycar Problem’, used in philosophy and ethics classes around the world.
Suppose the trolleycar is the Covid virus, that there are a million people on the straight track and 8 people on the switched track. Pulling the switch means applying the vaccine.
If you don’t pull the switch, a million people will die, but you will claim no responsibility. But if you pull the switch 8 people will die by your hand.
Most pundits believe that you should pull the switch and save a million lives.
However, suppose the mortality rate was not 8.2, but 8000 per million. Would a government be justified in sacrificing 8000 people in order to save a million? That’s a harder ethical question. What if the mortality were 80,000 per million? In that case, there would be a revolution if the government required vaccines, even though the government could claim that 80,000 predictable deaths is a small price to pay for saving a million lives.
So where do you draw the line? I don’t know, but if you sacrifice even one life, you are sliding down a slippery slope.
There is also a question regarding which people you are saving. The JAMA study showed that a disproportionate number of the 2.5 million saved lives were elderly. Would that fact change in any way a government’s vaccination policy? Maybe not, but it might. Suppose vaccines saved a higher proportion of white lives than black lives?
A word on ‘herd immunity’, which should not be necessary. There seems to be a feeling out there that governments should just let a pandemic take its natural course, without vaccination, because that will lead to herd immunity, in which case the pandemic disappears. That may be true, but only after millions of people die first. People may quote the following finding:
When a critical proportion of the population becomes immune, called the herd immunity threshold (HIT) or herd immunity level (HIL), the disease may no longer persist in the population, ceasing to be endemic . (Somerville M, Kumaran K, Anderson R (2012). Public Health and Epidemiology at a Glance)
However, that finding includes the use of vaccines to achieve the immunity level of HIL. Thus, vaccinations still may save millions of lives, because they cause the HIL to be reached sooner.