1. 'Effectively controlled' means they were able to vaccinate enough people to establish herd immunity. The vaccine is effective enough to prevent death, but only around 50% at stopping the disease totally. Between that and vaccine deniers, they never got enough people vaccinated to shut down continued transmission.
2. VAERS, which is the source used for the deaths and adverse reaction claims, is an unrestricted reporting source. If you got a headache a day after the vaccination, you can report it as an adverse event. Even if it had zero to do with the vaccine. Same with deaths. As a very new vaccine, lots of extra reporting. They use various analysis tools on the reports to figure out if there is an actual problem.

It kind of does work, but mRNA worked better.
From my reading, the COVID virus line are not easy for our immune system to learn, so the mRNA targeted approach ends up working better because we can tell the immune system 'here: target THIS'. With traditional vaccines, the cells targeted by the virus are not easy for the immune system to travel to and communicate back.

I can't help but think about picking some of the trippier comics, where you would be convinced that the writers and illustrators were on the good drugs.
Things like Superman having the power to create miniature duplicates, breath hallucigens, that sort of thing.

Personally, I'd expand a bit. Two games I've played recently are No Man's Sky, an open world SciFi survival craft game, and "Still Wakes the Deep", which is more a horror themed action visual novel.
Still Wakes the Deep is completely voiced, but utterly, absolutely, on the rails - there's always only one way forward. Thus, replayability factor is lacking.
No Man's Sky isn't voiced at all, but would likely make a lot of people cringe because of a large but still limited number of dialogues. Plus, well, probably whatever mechanic they use for the translation device, because you don't start knowing the alien languages. NMS has the "hundreds" of characters.
So I could see AI being used to not only create "hundreds" of different voices for all the characters, but to write different dialogue for them, even if it is variances on common themes.
Go from basically 100 characters with maybe different appearances to unlimited characters with like 100 archetypes.

You must not have traveled much in the last decade or so then.
Chargers are becoming more and more frequent. Though often they're not advertised outside of the charging apps, so they aren't super obvious unless you know what to look for.
That said, I didn't mention charging at night here.

70% charge@15 minutes ~ 210 miles = ~3 hours of driving @ 70mph. You could theoretically keep it up 24x7.
A nice long slow charge at night would help the battery, of course, and make it easier.

Did you miss that it was a family of 4? The wife was in the passenger seat. As they all died, we don't know if they were switching off or not.

Breaks to get out and walk around a bit are still good for health benefits.

And that's a very dangerous way to drive. We lost an incoming member and his family 50 miles outside of town because he presumably fell asleep at the wheel, crossed the median, and hit a semi front-end. All 4 in the car died.

Taking proper breaks isn't that hard and increases the chances you'll actually make it.

If I'd tried to submit a travel plan with your proposal as junior enlisted, I'd have been told to redo it.

A 15 minute break every 2 hours won't increase driving time by 50%. Worst case it'd change 8 days into 9, and that's only assuming that the breaks cut into driving time.
Meanwhile, driving without breaks and proper rest increases the chances that you will never make it, like the family that was coming to join my unit.
50 miles outside of town, crossed the median and hit the front end of a semi. All 4 in the car perished.
No drugs in the driver's system, all we could presume was that he fell asleep at the wheel.

Except that the IT department in charge of evidence never doctored that photo. The IT department in charge of the websites did.

You're supposed to take a break every two hours anyways, that can include a meal, snack, and hydration.
If you stock up and have a case of drinks, that is why I suggested a walk as an alternative.

They work for the occasional "blue moon" charging, I think. It'd be like having a house that is solar + battery also having a generator for "just in case", allowing the house to still have power during that week long storm front, an inverter failure, or even just the annual family visit where the place has 10X the normal people there.
Especially if the genset is already there for things like transmission line failures.
IE use the genset to allow EVs to get there to begin with, then upgrade to solar one they're a regular enough occurrence for that to make sense.

Sheep are being used specifically for solar systems
They keep the vegetation down while producing marketable products themselves.

I don't generally consider bathroom breaks, basic food and drinks to be entertainment myself. If you consider modern 70% charging times (From ~15% to ~85%), that's about the mandatory 15 minutes break period mandated in various places for continued good performance.

By the time somebody has plugged in their car, walked to and finished visiting the restroom including washing hands, gotten a drink and a snack, and walked back (actual order optional), it's quite likely that around 15 minutes has passed.

Maybe include a walking path or something around these stations, get a little exercise in? I know I feel better about long drives with regular walking breaks.

That was phrased badly. What I meant is that you can keep multiple versions of a photo, used for different purposes.

If you're doing things right, watermarking/editing a photo doesn't destroy the original. The original goes into evidence, the watermarked is posted to the public. That way, there's evidence of the source of the picture, even if it is scraped and separated from the website/page.

In physical terms, it'd be like writing the details of the photograph on the back, like what we used to do with traditional developed photographs.

I think that you're mixing up that a photo can be used for multiple purposes.
Basically, the original unedited photo goes into the police report/file for evidentiary purposes.
The altered photo - probably also resized and compressed to be easier on bandwidth, is what is posted for publicity purposes, where there isn't a police report also attached, where there's a high probability of it becoming disconnected from the website.
The version of the photo intended for facebook or whatever shouldn't ever be presented in court.