Note: I am living across the Channel, in Europe.
> Pretty much the entire US mainstream establishment said that, from what I can tell. There was a huge push to tell people that the pandemic could be over by now if not for the evil Trump-supporting antivaxers,
This is what I have seen on Twitter, reddit and imgur as well. In the forms of memes, with a very polarized and aggressive tones from left leaning people. I am surprised they don't see how their rhetoric and language constructs are the same as "the other side" and it will ultimately leads to the same kind of oversimplification and problems. The blame game is strong.
But was the CDC and the president and Fauci and others flat out saying that ?
Anyway, in continental western Europe the media hasn't pushed that narrative and I don't recall the establishment saying "we got the vaccine, covid is over".
edit: I do remember now that that at the beginning of the year, before delta and delta plus they were talk that if the vaccination campaign was fast enough we could get herd immunity (if 70% of the population is vaccinated) but rapidly in april or may I am sure they started to say alpha and delta changed that and we needed 90% and that wouldn't be possible.
But I have heard a lot of antivax saying that "vaccinated people think covid is over but they are wrong, they can still transmit it so they are more dangerous than unvaccinated people". A lot of straw men, a lot of bad faith in framing the situation to fit their worldview.
What I regularly see and frightens me though are headlines like "Finally we can let our masks at home, it's over". Newspapers and the establishment is making a huge fuss over wearing or not wearing masks in public transport or at work. I am of the opinion that the inconvenience is so minor and apparently it does help that I don't see why there's a debate around that, especially now that we are seeing raises in Belgium and Germany.
We don't hear (yet?) about how it's unvaccinated people's fault that there are new variants or restrictions. But I do hear from antivax that these restrictions don't make sense and are solely in place to annoy them and reduce their liberties because vaccinated people are scared of covid and they shouldn't be. This line of thinking is not yet present in our leader's speeches.
What they say though - when covid numbers are low - is that they should be able to lift off restrictions (that is proof of vaccination or negative test results) for their population and not be victims of their neighbour's bad handling of the situation. And that almost always come from right or far right leader, putting people against each other as usual. And they are now creating mini trump all over Europe to carry this message with all the tricks in Trump's book. That is scary.