I came here to say pretty much the same thing. My wife and I don't particularly feel like "heroes" by any measure. We simply looked beneath the incessant 24/7 hype, the inane little "bribes" they were offering (free donuts, cups of coffee, social duty, caring about your neighbors and family, and countless others) and became suspicious of the entire mess.

On local "news" -- mostly people who can barely read a teleprompter and constantly mispronounce the simplest of words -- we were treated to constant fear porn... the numbers of hospitalized, the numbers of deaths, and one station even had its own "COVID theme music," an ominous minor-key thing that was sort of like the "JAWS" theme, and my wife and I started mocking. We would sing along, "dundun dundundun dun dun...."

We also started digging into the various open sources then available. There wasn't enough scientific support for the vaxx'es, just the urging and blandishments of the elite and their celebrity spokespersons.... but there was quite a lot of negative conclusions at the time, which in time grew to an alarming bunch of studies and reports of side-effects.

Anyway, I resist the label "hero." Sure I lost a few acquaintances over it, but these were people who, upon reflection, were already a negative force in my life. I gladly let them go. Maybe it helps that I've always been a contrarian, since childhood, and don't give in to social pressure or constant propaganda. We just resisted the very idea of social isolation and doing what society tells us to do. And we're both better off for that.

All around us we see our close and distant friends getting sick, over and over, with "covid" and a couple have died in the last two years, despite (or because of) being vaxx'ed and boosted repeatedly..