I think it's hard to tease out what's caused by the shots and what's caused by an "organic" covid infection because, I suspect, they are affecting the body in similar ways. And I suspect that the murkiness around both long Covid and vaccine side effects may be due to them both affecting the body through an entirely different pathway than the acute respiratory attack caused by Covid's initial infection. I'm reading a Stephen Buhner article on covid and he's discussing how, although it enters the body as a respiratory virus, it can act like a "stealth pathogen" like Lyme and cause widespread chronic affects on all sorts of systems.

The medical community, focused on acute respiratory failure and cytokine storms, doesn't think that either long Covid or vaccine side effects are a major issue, but if those long-term chronic issues are caused by a different mechanism than the acute respiratory effects, then they don't get picked up in the study designs. And because we're essentially doing Phase IV clinical trials live on the whole population, it's nearly impossible to find an unvaccinated, uninfected group to run long-term trials on anyway. Anyone who still fits both criteria is certainly not going to be volunteering as a test subject!