The pandemic still happening is literally not because of individual anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, anti-lockdown people, etc. Like, don’t get me wrong, they have definitely killed people (though far, far more culpable are the media personalities who widely perpetuate these ideas), but even if everyone with access to them had worn masks this whole time and gotten the vaccine as soon as it was available to them, we would still have vaccine-resistant strains emerging from places like India and Botswana, because people in those places didn’t have as much of a choice about receiving the vaccine
The variants were directly caused by the exact thing epidemiologists have been warning us about since the beginning: patents on vaccines that were developed with government funding, and inadequate distribution to areas that can’t manufacture their own vaccines because of those patents. That’s what allowed the virus to circulate and mutate in those areas and produce new strains. This is a direct A to B causation that cannot be blamed on anti-vaxxers in the US or Europe - simply put, none of this will end until the vaccine patents are destroyed
And I feel like this should be obvious, but even if everyone in the US and Europe and wherever you live was fully vaccinated and quarantined and we somehow completely eradicated the virus in those places and you were able to go to comic book conventions again, the pandemic still wouldn’t be over, because a pandemic is by definition worldwide. You should care about people in other parts of the world because they’re people who deserve a good life just like you, not because they impact your ability to eat at restaurants
It’s literally the same shit they do when they try pin environmental problems on individuals using plastic straws and not giant corporations dumping on a scale that completely drawfs that.
Or the old “You’re being underpaid because of those illegal immigrants, not because the CEO is hoarding wealth like a dragon while he pays you all the barest fraction of what your labor’s worth”.
Like, please ignore our institutional policies and direct your vitriol at your neighbor.
