Entitled

"I'm entitled to my opinion about whether the vaccine is safe."

No, you're not.

I'm sorry, but unless you're a member of one of a few fairly restricted groups of people, that statement is just not true.

Before we start, let's be perfectly clear: One thing you are entitled to is an opinion on whether or not the benefits of the CoViD vaccine outweigh the risks. That's a value judgement, and, just as if you were to have a house with a front doorway but no front door (because you don't want to risk slamming your fingers in it) or walk barefoot across a junkyard full of rusty metal (because you're terrified of getting athlete's foot), it's your call. I may think your opinion is wrong, and I may think you're making a very bad decision, but hey, you do you.

With that out of the way:

I genuinely don't mean any offense, but the majority of people just aren't equipped to develop a coherent, well-formed opinion on the safety of the vaccine. It's not even a question of what you're "entitled to" or what you have a right to - it's a question of what is mentally possible. Most people just don't have the background knowledge needed to form an opinion that isn't gibberish.

"But I have an opinion!" you say.

Do you, though? Do you have your own opinion, formed from the available data, about the vaccine's safety? Or is "your opinion" someone else's opinion? And if it is someone else's opinion, are you repeating it as your own because you formed an opinion about which authorities to trust, or just because it "makes sense" to you? Because if it's the latter, unless you have some moderately specialized knowledge (which a few non-specialist members of the general public do have, but which most don't), you genuinely don't have the foundation upon which to base decisions about what "makes sense".

(Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with intelligence. You could be a genius, but unless you have the knowledge to work with, it doesn't matter. Even the best carpenter can' t conjure a table out of thin air - you need tools and raw materials to build an opinion, just like building anything else.)

To whit, you need to:

Know enough about microbiology to know what mRNA, tRNA, and rRNA are, where you would find a stop codon, and what primary, secondary and tertiary protein structure are, 

OR

Know enough about genetics to tell me what Cas9 does, why it's important, and what dominant, codominant, recessive and X-linked inheritance are, and to name at least half a dozen important genes (any organism) off the top of your head,

OR

Know enough about medical statistics to explain p-values, the Chi-squared test, the significance of sample size, and the difference between cohort and case-control studies,

OR

Know enough about human physiology to tell me what C-peptide and D-dimer have in common, where corticosteroid receptors are found, the difference between CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells, and what a portal system is (and the location of at least two of them),

OR

Know enough about applied medicine to interpret an ECG at a basic level, to immediately guess what the 30-year-old with an amylase of 32 000 was doing last night or the night before, to interpret anaemia bloods correctly, and to know offhand which colour tubes to use for a U&E, FBC and INR respectively.

OR

Know enough about virology to meet some basic standard of moderate professional competence which I'm not equipped to set because I don't know particularly much about theoretical virology.

If you don't match at least one of the above - and preferably several - any opinion you have is either someone else's (which you're putting forward as your own), or simply gibberish. Hopefully it's the former. Even if you do fit all of the above, of course, you can form a wrong opinion, but you at least have a chance of forming one that makes sense. It's the difference between "Lettuce is always orange" and "Banana until therefore any" - one is wrong, but the other is nonsense.

None of this is to try and discourage people from analysing what they read or hear, trying to understand or verify the opinions they are offered by others. On the contrary, trying to understand those things is a big part of how you get to the point of matching one of the categories above!

More importantly, you don't have to be a statistician to spot bad statistics, any more than you have to be a mechanic to know that the steering wheel should be facing the driver's seat and the gearstick should be attached to something. The problem comes in when you start assuming you will catch every statistical flaw despite not knowing statistics, or that you know exactly how the vaccine works despite not fully understanding the underlying biology.

Instead, this is about understanding the limitations of your knowledge, and working to expand and overcome them without getting caught up along the way. By all means, work towards forming an opinion of your own - just recognise that it takes a fair bit of work to actually accomplish that goal.