Hmmm, I agree and disagree here. Yes, 1% is still a mountain of death. I should be clear that I'm not at all suggesting this small percentage means that those deaths don't matter or that we shouldn't take COVID seriously.

Again, the issue is how accurately we understand the nature of the problem. How good a job are we doing of contextualising it? How do we weigh this risk against the very real problems that lockdowns and isolation are causing for some people?

But, unless you have information I don't (in which case I'd be very happy if you shared), the whole "protect each other by getting vaccinated" narrative and even the "protect each other by wearing masks narrative" doesn't seem to be borne out by the data. I think these ideas made perfect sense two years ago or even a year when we had no vaccines and very little idea of what we were facing.

But today we know that anything less than an N95, especially for omicron, is pretty much useless. We know that vaccinated people can still catch and spread COVID. We have enough data to make reasonable estimates of mortality rates.

So yes, I completely agree that the numbers overwhelmingly favour getting the vaccine and that they're safe (I'm in the same boat with my mother, desperately trying to undo the brainwashing she's received from Facebook so she'll get vaccinated). It just feels as if there are a lot of other conversations around our COVID response that need to be had. And I think the fact that we're not having them has driven some people into the arms of the crackpots.