Super appreciate your post and ask for debate. Particularly this sentence:
"I detest the conspirator theorists and bullies from the anti-vax brigade but equally, I detest the bullying from governments, forcing people into making the decisions they want them to."

I'm with you in that people should be free to decide - and exposed to information in both directions. Informed consent is a big deal, and there's not much opportunity for it in the public. I think civil debate (like you propose here) is the way to go. Now for perspective:

I think about this like sports (oversimplified) but when you have a GM or coach of a team who has a losing record, you fire him and change up the game plan. With COVID, no matter what the outcomes (distancing, masks, vaccine, vaccine II etc.) the 'solution' is always more government, less choice. Put aside vaccine efficacy, from a background perspective, this is not an even playing field and has never been. Our government projected a whole bunch that just never panned out:

• Mortality rates were wrong
• Death counts were wrong
• Rules were changed to count 'death' uniquely for covid
• The most at risk (here in the USA nursing home average life span is about 6 months, brittle population to say the least) were exposed directly to the most infected
• No hospitals were overrun (in the USA), see the boat and park they made in NYC that was largely empty and left a few weeks after it arrived

So before we get to the vaccine, we've got a lot of really disingenuous people calling the shots, and not taking the blame for bad decisions that did cost lives. Those same people are leading the vaccine charge - and were against it until Trump lost generally. So politically it looks messy.

Now for data:

Pfizer's phase III trial results are here: trial results if you read it, 21720 vaccinated, 21728 in the placebo group. A randomized control test is the way to go. 8 cases amongst vaccinated, 162 amongst placebo. Yes, it's true that 8 is 95% better than 162 - which has been the title and justification for vaccination. But 162/21728 is 0.74%.

That means that of the placebo group, 99.3% didn't get COVID. Of the vaccinated 99.8% didn't get it.

Coming back to efficacy, 0.5% lift in a study that small is not statistically significant. I'm not saying the vaccine doesn't work, there's plenty of data out there that suggests it does something. The point is: if we're trying to save a life - why wouldn't we tell people that doing nothing gets you 99% of the way there?

If life-saving were the goal:

1. We would never mandate something that wasn't free - do you think Pfizer would produce and push vaccines if it wasn't such a moneymaker?
2. We would offer a choice: the options are two of basically the same vaccine, no mention of HCQ, Ivermectin, budesonide, vitamin d, zinc. If those have been proven to save lives, and are demonstrably safer than the vaccine, why no mention of them?
3. We wouldn't pay hospitals based on covid deaths
4. We wouldn't silence doctors with opposing views

If you look at this from a business perspective, a day after FDA approval the Pfizer CEO announced the vaccine won't be effective against the delta variant. In the USA we don't have PCR tests developed to detect the delta variant, it's done in a centralized lab that's estimating cases based on a % of samples it sees. If delta's that scary, why not make a test for it before we start crediting it for all our mitigation efforts not working? Convenient scapegoat eh?

This hasn't been an above-board approach. Again the vaccines could be incredible, from the numbers I've seen, potentially an upside of 60-70% protection in most cases (see Israel, and NYC, double-digit percentages hospitalized are vaccinated). But this feels a lot more like a push for power and money than something genuinely meant to help people.

So again, skeptical because the people behind it have been wrong at every turn, and don't have a decent track record of being honest with the data.

Most strikingly, ZERO discussion of natural immunity. Studies out of Israel suggest it's 10-12x more effective than the vaccine. But serious question marks: if the goal is to save lives, and we've got a 4 billion-year-old immune system that works pretty well - how are we suddenly all incapable of surviving this thing without Pfizer? If it's because this is a Chinese bioweapon that does scary stuff to us and only Pfizer can counter say that publically, and go after China. But we haven't doing that so I don't think it is. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be about saving lives.