Agreed, although it was a very short period of time.

I've repeatedly said that for those at real risk (basically middle age adults and older unless there were special risk factors involved) immunization was your safest way to get an initial exposure) but with the logistics of a mass immunization that initially did first target the elderly, by the time they got around to targeting the general population the protection of the first group had already waned. It saved them from severe disease but not from getting the disease. And by the time the deadlines on mandatory vaccination expired by the younger groups (as in the uniformed services) most of them had already survived one or more infections already and except for the I-gave-you-a legal-order-mister issue going after those not yet vaccinated really didn't make sense, their already low susceptibility to serious disease had already saved with their exposure naïveté.

What irritates the hell out of me was that by that time we already knew the age related pathogenicity curve of the illness from the early Spanish and Italian outbreaks data where 50% of mortality was in the 85 year old and over age group. The CDC HAD THAT DATA and routinely collect such data in the US as well WHICH UNLIKE FOR PREVIOUS DECADES THEY STOPPED PUBLISHING. Whether that was someone's idea to encourage immunization or if they just sent those people home and were unable to continue disseminating it or those people got redistributed to some other job I have no idea, but the statistics af lethality related to age were known overseas early on.

Also known early on - from the beginning really - was the quick waning of protection from reinfection after initial immunization with corronavirus immunizations - not just with the initial strain but with coronaviruses in general. There are a number of veterinary coronavirus vaccines on the market that are useful because you can vaccinate the whole herd simultaneously which is commercially helpful if you are protecting a herd of animals although none protect from reinfection for very long, dropping back to full susceptibility by nine months. Similar relatively brief immunity to reinfection after exposure to the four commonly circulating human coronaviruses is seen, with susceptibility to reinfection occurring quickly - 50% can be reinfected within three months.

What made sense and saved the most lives was immunizing the elderly and at high risk first but it was never going to stop the epidemic from burning itself out because worldwide immunization within the timeframe of immunity from reinfection of the initially vaccinated group was logistically impossible. Hell, 20% of the world's population have STILL not had immunizations and many who have been immunized have been immunized with Sinovax which wasn't terribly effective to begin with.

Treating those people who failed to get vaccinated - either because of fear, misinformation, religious belief, or simple ignorance as some sort of traitor to the human race or potential Typhoid Mary was never warranted. And doing so after the most vulnerable were already protected and most of the antivaxxers had already had the disease anyway wasn't science, it was just an abuse of the police power of the state. But the real harm was what the shutdowns did to the educational status of the kids - which is well documented - and to other branches of preventative medicine.

When you stop doing Pap smears, mammograms, and screening sigmoidoscopies for a year, those cancers don't stop happening. They are just detected later - at more advanced stages and in greater numbers, overtaxing the facilities that treat them and giving people poorer outcomes.

Thise were not just a predictable result of the shutdowns, they were a predicted result of the shutdowns. We did it anyway. And the arrogance and incompetence with which it was done (do you recall New York and New Jersey MANDATING that nursing homes full of the most susceptible people take in known actively contagious COVID patients to free up hospital space?) only created more antivaxxers and fed into conspiracy theories.

For the next 100 years this is going to be taught in graduate schools as the way to NOT handle a pandemic.