Here [1] is a montage of some of the public messaging around the COVID vaccines. [1] It was quite simply dishonest. That, paired alongside the effort to force people to take the shots, completely destroyed public trust on a level that will take many decades to repair. Generalized vaccine skepticism follows naturally from that.
I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic.
It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else.
[1] - https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192
But this has been building for years ahead of COVID. COVID just gave people something to latch on to. And in spite of COVID vaccine issues, the latest numbers i saw suggest around 80% of people still support standard childhood vaccinations.
You have your chain of logic backwards. You wanted to be skeptical and "concerned" and so forth so you went out and found reasons to justify it.
Why is it bad for a public health communicator to say that vaccines stop spread by lowering the effective reproduction number of a pathogen? Its correct. Your extensive research didn't seem to work.