> 3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity. Yeeeeesss. The vaccines are beneficial in preventing ser

> 3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity. Yeeeeesss. The vaccines are beneficial in preventing serious illness but it's important not to overstate their efficacy. As I write this I have COVID, which I caught from my girlfriend. We're not sure where she got it, but she started showing symptoms and tested positive last Saturday. I started showing symptoms on Monday but didn't test positive until Wednesday. We're both double vaxxed and boosted. In my case I had 2 x AZ and 1 x Moderna. Can't remember off the top of my head what she had. Both of us are in good health. Neither of us have underlying health conditions. She's fortunately started feeling a lot better now but I've really only just passed rock bottom. I feel much better than yesterday but still far from well. The internet is full of stories of people who were all, "I had COVID: it lasted 4 days and was no big deal," and then a week later are either in ICU or dead, so I'm not taking anything for granted. Seeming to get better and then getting rapidly worse, or having it linger on for a surprisingly long time, is something of a hallmark of COVID. (Of course, there are also plenty of people for whom it really is no big deal.) Probably I won't become seriously ill or die, but COVID is no picnic, and if you had the choice of getting it versus not getting it I'd advise against it. Even with Omicron, if a large enough proportion of the population were infected at one time, our healthcare systems would collapse under the pressure. Whilst I don't like to credit the current UK government with terribly much intelligence, our experience in this country has been that it has required some degree of careful management to avoid that scenario playing out. Even still, our death rate is high compared with many other nations. There's also the fact that the picture is very different across different countries: for example, the situation in Ireland is very different to the UK. TO BE CLEAR: Unless you have a very clear and specific medical reason not to, you should get vaccinated, but let's not pretend the vaccines are a panacea. That's misinformation as much as it is to state that they're completely unnecessary, that COVID is some sort of elaborate hoax, or - and I don't have enough faces or palms to adequately express my despair at this perspective - that they're some sort of government conspiracy to track us all with nanobots.