Two news stories are illustrative of the current state of the COVID panic and public health. Biden got his third booster, but it appears he is nearly alone in this. Uptake for boosters is very low, with fewer than 10 percent of eligible people getting them.
The COVID vaccines’ lackluster benefits, significant apparent health risks, recent admissions that they do nothing to stop transmission, additive risk from boosters, combined with the general sense that COVID is not worth worrying about for most people have reduced COVID’s salience in the news and in our lives. With many people having already gotten and survived COVID with little difficulty, there is no longer the fear and uncertainty that prevailed in the earliest days of the pandemic.
