It’s like the existence of the vaccine was this thing that made people suddenly decide the pandemic was over,* despite the fact that it requires people to actually get it to have any effect, and everyone knows there are hold-outs. It’s crazier in the UK, where I frequently see news stories/people talking about the pandemic being over, despite them hitting their highest death tolls now, and the fact that the vaccines that most people got aren’t the most efficacious against the variants, to the point where even if literally 100% of the population got vaccinated, apparently that still wouldn’t provide herd immunity.
*Although there’s also this strain of thinking that’s been around since the start of the pandemic, that at some point, the virus would fade into the background and we’d just “live with it” (in some presumably less-dangerous form), with people pointing to the 1918 flu pandemic as a model. Except a) that’s not exactly what happened in 1918 (seems like things were pretty ugly for years after), and b) that’s really not what’s happening with covid, which appears to be significantly worse in many ways than the '18 flu.
