Very true re: mainstream media coverage ignoring stats that don't align with their narrative or reporting in a misleading way. But I think a more cogent comparison would be China vs. US COVID figures, as both are larger and denser-populated countries. China's COVID mortality rates were a fraction of US rates though their population is much larger, indicating that the vaccines were effective. Another distinction is the severity of the disease to infected people before vaccines became available as compared to after (much worse in 2020; now people are saying "it's just like the flu."). Another is the growing rate of autoimmune issues, strokes, liver damage, and so on, above pre-COVID yearly figures, and so likely to be aftereffects of the virus after multiple infections (e.g., it's not just another flu). The fact that infection rates and long-term effects are not yet under control doesn't indicate that the vaccines were useless; our inconsistent policies in the West failed to contain the virus before it mutated. I think we were having the wrong debates during the lockdowns. It's never been a draconian choice between pinning down citizens and forcibly injecting them, or just going back to life as usual. We could have insisted on proof of vaccination for certain activities in dense cities, reopened schools more cautiously after installing air filters, and continued to mask in enclosed group settings, while encouraging socializing outdoors. Clearly we have made many mistakes and now there are too many variants to hope to eradicate them all, but vaccines and masks used judiciously have been proven to reduce at least the severity of infections, the amount of contagious viral load, and the risk of long-term effects.