Denialist delusionals like you are why I wear a mask in the lift in our apt building in Jurmala and can no longer play basketball 3x/week like two years ago. Add in selfishly vaxxhole and maskhole neighbors utterly indifferent to our other immunocompromised neighbors, and who raise my chances of getting long COVID, with its life-ruining symptoms of chronic fatique and brain fog. COVID isn't a binary of death or you're fine afterwards. Discounting it as "safer than driving a car" is utter math-illiterate idiocy if you include the large % of patients who experience long haul COVID symptoms. If the vaxxholes and maskholes had gotten vaccinated after the vaccines were available, and our incompetent govts had exported billions of doses to Africa, we would never have had the Delta or Omicron variants. Again, selfishly indifferent individuals + selfish vaccine nationalist governments add up to an endemic chronic and systemic disease that we could have sent the way of smallpox, if we'd had teamwork and global solidarity, merely thinking of the impact our choices have on those around us. Your article is symptomatic of Don't Look Up-style denialist ignorance. It's that unreasoning anti-science nonsense like this is so widespread that's depressing, and that deprived me of basketball, not COVID. What people like you, and our vaxxhole neighbors need to get through their thick heads is that everybody must make the choice that protects their most vulnerable, immunocompromised neighbors, not just for themselves. Discovering the degree of zero social capital selfish indifference all around was far more depressing than any social deprivations from COVID itself.