And the vaccinated shouldn't feel much safer

This is it, folks.  A study out of Columbia (the university, not the country) concludes the Omicron strain is essentially vaccine-resistant, monoclonal antibody-resistant, and thus we are back to the beginning, except with a much more infectious strain.  Should we have developed vaccines against a more conserved region of SARS-CoV-2?  Of course.  But would they have been 95% effective as those developed against the wild-type strain at the time?

Where we blew it was not in not preparing enough vaccine for the global population, or in not requiring everyone around the world get the jab simultaneously.  As a practical matter, there probably weren't ever going to be enough high-efficacy vaccines available for the entire 7.9 billion of us on the planet, or even those in the subset above 65 years of age.  As a political matter, none of these barriers even mattered, even locally, because enough uneducated folks were available right here in Estes Park and Larimer County to thwart efforts to reach "herd immunity" and start stomping a worthless shred of parasitic RNA into oblivion.

So you got your wish, deniers.  You that aren't dead have been proven "correct" in your lazy, ignorant way.  The current iteration of the vaccine isn't going to work.  So what are your suggestions now, geniuses?  We had a way out of this mess, and you not only wouldn't cooperate, you killed 800,000 of your fellow Americans in the bargain.  What are your better suggestions?  Meaning, how do we get through this without losing 2.2 million more, or were you hardened enough and Ramboed enough to that possibility from the beginning to not really care about any death count, even if your “freedom” took out 1% of us?