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I have a lot of unvaccinated friends, some of whom have now had COVID. Their experience is not any different to those who were vaccinated. Bear in mind, Omicron emerged in 25% vaccinated South Africa and the reports from there were that it was so mild people didn't even realize they had COVID.

The problem with your view about "uninformed and malicious actors" is that this is how public health describes anyone who points out their mistakes. It's a cliché they use to shut down debate and opposition. I've read a lot of material about vaccines now from non-public health sources and never seen any that could be described as malicious or uninformed. Indeed, they are usually way more informed than those who simply "follow the science". And the idea they're malicious is pure Hollywood fiction. None of them ever are. They just want to know what's true about the disease and vaccines. You could though, argue that about the public health officials who constantly lie to the public about scientific topics in order to generate compliance.

Not sure how things things you project on my view about uninformed and malicious actors in our broad information ecosystem are a problem for my view.

This is just an anecdotal experience, but I was living amongst an international coworking community of a few dozen people in South Africa when omicron first broke out, and the vaccination status of people did not seem to have any observable effect on the prevalence or severity of the contracted disease.

That is to say that your sister may have experienced the same effects even if she had taken the booster.

> To toss in the requisite anecdata, my sister got pregnant this past fall. She was due for a booster but FUD about it hurting the baby swayed her mind. She got omicron in late December, post-covid complications nearly took her and the baby in late February, and she had to live in the hospital until she delivered in June.

The tricky thing with this though is that, what if there is an unknown side effect due to lack of research that could have hurt the baby (how many years of research have boosters had?), and she didn't experience that side effect but unwittingly chose a different evil?

To put the exclamation point on it, she went into respiratory distress, was within minutes of death and was saved by a week on ECMO.

Until the vaccine kills more pregnant women than covid, it's not tricky. (Spoken, as before, as a selfish older brother who almost lost one of the few people who'll ever think I hung the stars.)

I wrote a little about this @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31208231