You're drawing a false equivalence. Polio, measles and smallpox killed a LOT more people as the diseases were not only more deadly, they were also more transmissible. COVID is a coronavirus, we get those all the time, we get cold and flu, some more transmissible than others. There have been years where flu pandemics happened.
Yes, it's great they eventually got vaccines, but the development of those vaccines were controlled, took a long time and had many, many missteps that were eventually corrected. Yet we're to believe that these experimental vaccines are 100% safe. I would be more than happy if there was a 'regular' vaccine for COVID, yet this is not allowed in the US, we have to take an experimental vaccine system that hasn't been proven yet and over the last 50 years of development has never worked (there are various mRNA trials for HIV in the last few decades).
It's called a risk assessment, the risk of you dying is lower if you do x than when you do z, that doesn't make it the wrong decision if you do x and z still happens. Everyone has access to the same information, yet some entities are actively suppressing the necessary information and putting out wrong information. The CDC is for example making decisions based on what the school unions think will be financially beneficial to them and their members, ignoring the science.
Even if you believe the vaccines work, why is so much effort being put into shaping the message on social media and news outlets? Why aren't we talking about the women who start having irregular periods, or the potential deaths and the rates of complications? It doesn't inspire confidence if there is one side trying to suppress information, it always leads to questions of "why". That is what drives vaccine hesitancy.