It feels very strange watching people who don't realise yet that they have been poisoned.

Unless they haven't. I've still been trying to warn people just in case it saves someone who could be saved. However, they won't necessarily thank us for frightening them if it turns out that it was mainly placebo, mainly targeted at the criminals, or even contained some secret thing which was necessary to wake them up. Yes, it's a war, with casualties, but we can hope that they were minimised. Our pessimism was necessary, but we may have been used too as part of white hat disinformation. I don't apologise for espousing the precautionary principle, even if things turn out better than I feared.