It kills a bit more often than most flu strains. Like the flu, it's worrisome or not on a person-by-person basis. Most people survive it.
The vaccines are safe, but that needs clarification. People make a judgement about risk. Every vaccine carries the risk of a bad reaction. Every choice to not vaccinate carries the risk of a bad outcome. Vaccines lower the rate of death and disability--however they produce a small(er) risk of their own. They redistribute the risk: It's highly unlikely that one of the people nailed by a reaction to a vaccine would have been one of the people who would be nailed in a particularly nasty way by the virus. But saying no to a vaccine is a clear choice; saying no to exposure to and contracting of a virus is a bit harder to wrangle. This isn't the argument that's made, and in the omitted truth a bit of falsehood can creep. On the other hand, it's a tricky argument to make in 15 words or 5 seconds.
Herd immunity's possible. And, in fact, even with the existence of certain categories of exemptions it was attained. Part of the problem is that the utilitarian argument becomes too binary, too either/or: There's all the exemptions possible or there are no exemptions allowed. Many people expert at "critical thinking" sacrifice logic at the altar of rhetoric. Herd immunity was lost when it was decided that exemptions for any reason were required, since if one person can have some sort of exemption then everybody must have the same rights. Instead of having a threshold at which the right is respected it leads to a complete denial of the right. Sort of like free speech--once people start saying, "No, that can't be respected because it hurts somebody, however indirectly" the idea of free speech is a fiction--it's just where the majority decides to let the right stand, and governments aren't there to protect rights but to grant them to the privileged.
The individual-versus-collective rights issue is one that won't be definitively resolved. Many are all for individual rights when they want the rights, they're all for collective rights as soon as that helps them. Some like to say that it's the bad people who want to privatize benefits and socialize risks and then turn around and say, "I'm good, because I want to privatize benefits I receive and socialize my risks." Hypocrisy has become one of the top 10 American virtues.
Very often the I-verus-we argument boils down to a small percentage of people who are immunosuppressed and who deserve individual rights at the expense of the community. It's a tough thing to balance. Those who argue that no exemptions should be allowed because those individuals' rights are more important than the "hands off my body" or "my religion says ..." folk's "privileges" don't follow through with their arguments because they wind up with conflicting values. Many of the cases of measles in the US in the last decade were from people traveling to the US from other countries that had active measles outbreaks (perhaps large scale, perhaps not so large), and the argument, extended, would be to ban people without proper immunization records from such countries--and if they arrive illegally, increase the penalty to punish them for putting Americans at risk of death. Places like the Philippines or Honduras have had such outbreaks, as well as Ukraine and Israel. We hear about the unvaccinated Americans who travel abroad and bring back the virus, not visitors, legal and illegal, who bring the virus here, because the partial truth serves rhetoric at the expense of logic. Again, omitted truth can often allow for falsity to creep in.
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