> a huge chunk of the population already got covid during the entire year no vaccine existed and have natural immunity, so that's not really a factor at this point.

The new variants are effective at evading immunity from earlier variants so, no, that's not moot. Even without evasion you'd still need to consider how quickly immunity wanes, too. The vaccines are holding up well for avoiding hospitalization but you're still looking at multiple per year given how much COVID has been mutating.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-new-covid-wave