The Epoch Times 
With the New Year’s Eve passing, 2021 is now the second year defined by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic and the global response to it. Compared to 2020, last year was not only deadlier, but also more complicated. Issues such as virus variants, vaccine resistance, and vaccine efficacy have come to the forefront. Mandatory vaccination went from a “conspiracy theory” to official policy in a matter of months. Increasingly prominent were also legal battles over government restrictions on the population, with approaches taken by different states further diverging.
Although 2021 started with a massive wave of COVID-19-related hospitalizations, there was also an expectation that the pandemic would soon end or at least fade into the background. Vaccination was billed as the ticket to normalcy, and initially it looked that way. By mid-June, about 180 million Americans had received at least one does of one of the approved vaccines and even states with the most authoritarian approaches, such as New York, had lifted most of their restrictions…
