I am an RN who on occasion works with covid patients (positive, sick enough to be in distress and then admitted/kept hospital, but not ICU level sick yet due to our facility limitations), and just got my first vaccination, here where I am it is available pretty much to only health care workers in still fairly limited age groups and a start today on some nursing home residents. Like others have said, I trust the science. I have a sibling who is in medical laboratory technology and she has explained many things to me. It may seem "rushed" but the prelimary groundwork had been laid in research on other coronaviruses, SARS, etc over the last number of years to make a vaccine come quickly.
We have a whole generation or two that does not have any recent memory of major outbreaks of disease sweeping the population. I am old enough to have that smallpox vaccine scar on my arm, a major disease eliminated through vaccination. My grandfather lost his mother, and his grandmother in the same day in the Spanish flu epidemic when he was only 6 years old. I have been told by my older relatives the relief and excitement that happened when the polio vaccine came about. We don't know what it is like to die from infections that would be regarded as simple in today's terms because penicillin hadn't yet been discovered. I think that really affects the general populations' view on some things....sometimes when we have the technology, we feel invincible and don't expect to be felled by a mere virus. Maybe that contributes to the whole "it's just a flu" mentality, or vaccine hesitancy, I don't know.
Maybe it's an "out of sight, out of mind"concept....if you don't know anyone who has contracted Covid it's hard to see the reality of it. I've been in on my fair share of deaths in my day, but believe me the ones I have been directly involved in from this are not pleasant---when you can barely speak and are gasping in a panic, medication and oxygen only do so much and seeing someone go downhill in a matter of hours after that is heartbreaking. And not just those who died, but the aftereffects of living through a bad case of it.
The things I have experienced so far make me not hesitate to take that vaccination, and believe me I stood in that line on Sunday in reverence and appreciative of my chance I have over others right now. "Preexisiting conditions" or "old age" be damned, these people who have died are still someone's loved one, still meant something to someone. To fight this disease, we at the very least need to realize that it is not all about us, it is about society as a whole, our fellow man, including those categories of people. Makes a whole new meaning to the platitude "we are all in this together"....