This is a serious question, I'm wondering why it is that the "possible unknown long term effects" of covid were so drastically up-played for all of 2020 while today the "possible unknown long term effects" of the covid vaccines are so drastically downplayed and considered a conspiracy theory.

Back in mid-to-late 2020 when we were finally getting a statistical picture of who was really being affected by covid, the real death rates among different age groups and health groups, etc, people started pointing out that it's not really all that dangerous for most healthy, young individuals and were using it to argue that we should scale back quarantine measures. The response to that was, "But we don't know the long-term effects! It's a new virus, we don't know what will happen to people who survive these infections months, years, or decades down the line, so we can't afford to let anyone get infected if they can avoid it." Okay, sure, that makes sense. I accepted that reasoning.

Now, today, we have this new type of vaccine that has undergone relatively little active testing and does not have the kind of long-term follow-up studies that most vaccines have to go through before their general approval and release. So I think back to what people said about the possible long-term effects of covid, and point out that we don't know the long-term effects of this type of vaccine (as well as plenty of other people are pointing this out). But the response to that seems to be that there is no need to worry about long-term effects of drugs or vaccines, what could possibly happen, it's stupid to entertain these ideas, you're just an anti-science conspiracy nut.

So what fucking gives? Why the double standard? Do people legitimately just not think that brand new pharmaceutical techniques could be potentially dangerous?