If there ever was a time to face facts, it is now. Those of us who still have a degree of sanity left need to shout it from the rooftops: The war is over, and the virus won. It is here, it is extremely contagious, it is (sadly) deadly to some, and it’s NEVER going away. The best we can hope for is a semblance of herd immunity that helps control an endemic virus that – hopefully – will over time become more of a cold than a deadly pathogen. Obviously, the powers-that-be have been fighting hard for the vaccine kind of immunity, but the more time that passes and the more data that comes in (especially from Israel and the UK), the more obvious it’s becoming that these vaccines aren’t preventing transmission or contraction, and what efficacy they do provide wanes in a matter of months. In other words, vaccine-generated herd immunity isn’t happening, and given that we’ve NEVER had a sterile vaccine against a coronavirus, it probably never will.

That means that, in some form or other, almost everybody with a pulse is going to get Covid-19 or a variant thereof. If everyone would simply accept this simple fact and prepare accordingly, we could avoid so much of the needless destruction we’re doing to ourselves. Sure, this preparation could come in the form of taking a vaccine, especially for those who are in a vulnerable category (in order to make the virus milder for them), but for all it also should come in the form of health measures we’ve known for decades: losing weight, getting in shape, taking key vitamins like zinc and vitamin D, and addressing existing health issues. Taking yourself out of a vulnerable category puts you at far less risk of a bad outcome. Of course, nobody in government is going to tell its subjects anything like that, because none of this has ever been about public health.