Social Fragmentation

Over the years, I've come to accept that the marketing and propaganda apparatus (the public relations industry) has no scrupules and will regularly engage in fairly appalling campaigns to promote a product or a sponsor's message.

Nonetheless, what I saw them do during COVID-19 was on a completely different level from anything I'd seen in the past. For instance, it was so shameless (e.g., consider the gift cards, lotteries, KFC, donuts [which CNN repeatedly promoted] alcohol, illicit drugs and brothel sessions were given away as incentives to get the vaccine).

Likewise, one horrendous tactic the vaccine industry had pioneered with pertussis vaccine suddenly went into full throttle.

In theory, if a vaccine "works" you should be protected from individuals who are infected, including those who never vaccinated. Unfortunately, this is not good for vaccine sales as that doesn't win over people who don't want to vaccinate, particularly since a non-vaccinated cohort can serve as a control group that shows the dangers of the vaccine (e.g., the industry has done everything it can to stonewall trials of unvaccinated children, but when conducted, those trials consistently show vaccinated children have 3-10 times as many chronic illnesses).

To solve this, three sales pitches were developed:

1) Eliminating an infectious disease is only possible if a sufficient amount of the population is vaccinated (thereby creating herd immunity). This essentially has never worked (discussed further here), so as the years have gone by (and sometimes even within a vaccine campaign) once the populace can be made to accept the premise of "herd immunity," the percentage of people who need to vaccinate is steadily increased, and harsher and harsher penalties are leveraged against those who still refuse to vaccinate (as harsher penalties become more politically viable once they target a smaller and smaller minority).
Note: the two major exceptions to what I just stated about a disease being eliminated were smallpox (which was eliminated primarily because the limited transmission of the disease made it possible to isolate sick contacts) and polio (because the environmental causes of it were eliminated and the remaining cases reclassified). Additionally, high vaccination rates are necessary for herd immunity to measles (a vaccine that does "work"), but this is a result of our natural herd immunity being replaced with a temporary vaccine herd immunity which results in measles rapidly spreading in communities the moment vaccination rates dip (or vaccine immunity wanes) and measles is introduced to the community.