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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

We did. We have multiple vaccines and treatments. That was the end game. If those didn’t work, we have no choice but either live in some dystopian hellscape to save people from exactly one illness at the cost of literally all other issues… or we accept the risks and move on with our lives.

2 years of this is a non trivial amount of time.

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We do have another choice, continuing to buy time to add to the arsenal of weapons we have against the virus. Things are only simple when you frame the issue simply; reality is complicated. You need only imagine yourself flickering out to see the value in doing what you can to keep someone from the same fate.

We are all alive in our heads just like you are in yours.

You are free to live that existence all you want but that is your own personal risk assessment. Vaccines were the end of the game for governments being able to dictate our own risk assessments. There is literally nothing else we can do besides vaccines and treatments.

To suggest it is totally cool to play this game 2 years into this requires an awful lot of privilege.

Just repeating that something is "the end game" doesn't make it so. That isn't how public health works.

There is no certain amount of privilege required to "play this game" for 2 years than 1 year, or 1 month. You're setting up arbitrary lines in the sand and pretending they're laws of nature or maybe government.

I understand 2 years is as long as you want to wait, but we're all doing things we don't want to be doing. Such is the cost of living in a society.

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