My principal objection to going out to the pub atm is the same as it was when we got cocky over the summer: it just feels a bit grim to be waited on by people in masks and face shields who are exposing themselves for 8+ hour shifts so I can have a pint for 10 minutes.

Really feels like capitalism at its most odious. Idk.

I don't like power imbalances at the best of times, but when there's such a stark, visible divide between the (usually young) workers who have no choice but to risk their health and the chortling gammons who roll into Wetherspoons to sit at a garden table for a bit...ugh...

This is absolutely a personal thing btw. I'm not suggesting it's good praxis or anything. Those precariously employed people need businesses to be open, for one thing.

And I don't really know how we all transition into just going out and doing stuff comfortably again. Maybe champing at the bit to go and live life *is* healthier in the long run.

But until we have only a tiny number of cases in the country and the vast majority of people have been fully vaccinated, it's a two-tier society even if you're not going to catch covid.

Which is a broader issue with vaccine passports that's getting lost in all the antivax and covid-sceptic noise: opening society to the vaccinated only basically creates a temporary underclass of mostly young service workers.

We shouldn't be "returning to normal" until *everyone* is protected by means of (actual) herd immunity.

Yeah, and this is the worry: what if we get to a point where it's only like, under 25s who aren't vaccinated, and then the gov't decides their level of risk is acceptable? https://twitter.com/geeoharee/status/1381586403935588354?s=19

Because the supplies have run out or whatever. And then we have a *permanent* caste of "unvaccinated" for whom there is a public health justification to limit their participation in society.

Service workers wearing masks forever, the vaccine not being offered on the NHS...it's a grim picture.

It's then not the people who won't get vaccines that are second-class citizens, but those who can't afford to. God knows I want to get vaccinated and be able to get on a plane and see my mum regardless of what anybody else is up to, but it's tricky, isn't it?

There are no easy solutions to global pandemics, and it's done us no good this past year to pretend there might be. We just had to be sensible and empathetic. We just had to be kind, really.