Depression, suicide, drug abuse, supply shortages, inflation, people not returning to the workforce. A year ago you would have been cancelled for daring to voice negative consequences to lockdowns
* They're trying to optimize for 2 (sometimes) contradictory problems: getting the right answer AND maintaining their job/power. A random bloke on the Internet just is trying to optimize for 1 problem, getting the right answer: any other considerations like fielding off hungry young political competitors or maintaining corporate stock prices so you stay in their good graces aren't factors in the slightest to a random well-intentioned smart guy on the Internet.
* They are very smart at their field of expertise, but they're specialists and not generalists. They are very bad at considering second-order effects outside of their narrow field of expertise. Something like a lockdown in some city might indeed immediately save 1,000 extra people from a Covid death. Any risk-benefit analysis and deeper consideration of that lockdown on other problems such as drug/alcohol abuse and overdose deaths, suicides and hopelessness and depression, obesity increases leading to many health problems and deaths later on, deaths caused by missed cancer screenings and other medical problems, loss of freedom, or its economic impact and long-term impact on society isn't even a consideration by officialdom. Maybe 1,000 people are saved to kill 2,000 and cause even further societal problems. Yet those 1,000 deaths saved would be characterized as a win and proof that lockdowns work because no other factors can be considered. I'd strongly argue that a smart engineer or CEO (professions who are trained to considering multiple factors and tradeoffs in complex decision-making) would be better suited to make these kinds of complex societal decisions than a scientist focused on a narrow field.
* They're frighteningly bad at normal risk-management calculations. One could make a very reasonable argument that a normal fit 0 to 40 year old shouldn't get a new vaccine which has no long-term test data for an illness that statistically has a very low risk for them: and many people are reasonably making that risk-management calculation. Yet many experts are rushing into advocating vaccines even for children despite no long-term test data. The risk management calculation for a vaccine in this circumstance is completely different for the old and young, yet no consideration of this is allowed.
* Even when they sometimes get things right, most of what what even well-informed members of the public hear from the experts is filtered through the media. Unfortunately, outside of a handful of decent journalists who are reasonably smart and understand nuance (and who are mostly shunned from mainstream outlets) there is no collection of stupider people on the planet to try and analyze complex subjects or ask scientists real questions.
Covid is not low risk for 35-40 year olds. Someone age 25 with both vaccination doses is at higher risk of death than an unvaccinated 12 year old. How you've managed to extrapolate from this to "low risk to people up to age 40" is baffling, especially when you spend the rest of your post talking about how bad people are at understanding data.
What threshold are you using to define “low risk” ?
In my opinion, just about everyone is low risk but there is jump in numbers once the 35-40 age group is added
Science qua science can give humans all kinds of (nearly) objective information about viruses and vaccines.
A risk-management calculation is not science: that kind of decision comes down to factors such as one's own risk tolerance and projection of the risks involved and many other subjective factors, including trust. For a reasonably well-informed Covid vaccine decision, you have to weigh factors such as your personal risk from Covid and compare that to somewhat known short term potential vaccine injuries/side-effects, and unknown long-term vaccine issues.
Whether you or I personally think a vaccine is a good or bad thing for a healthy ~40 year old to take is irrelevant. If you feel safer with it, you are certainly free to take it. The point I'd like to make is that many 40 year olds can reasonably look at Covid death rates for their age group, and compare it to the known short term problems, as well as weigh the likelihood of long-term issues, and come to a sane and reasonable decision to not want to rush and take it.
For me, my big issue with the vaccines is fertility. We found out after a few years that Thalidomide caused birth-defects, as just one example in the history of medicine. Personally speaking, I think rushing to mass-inject all children with this (as some people want) is the worst risk-management decision in the history of humanity.
Most random folks on the internet seem to be optimizing for dopamine hits, not correct answers. Anyone with an audience is optimizing for subscription uptake, which seems to reliably lead in the opposite direction from correct answers.
> Stuff about "mainstream [media] outlets" shunning all "decent journalists"
This kind of silliness does nothing but weaken the rest of your arguments, IMO.
And just FYI, I never said "all" journalists, I was only referring to most, a not altogether uncommon opinion.
Also, I don't think it would have been useful to talk about Covid response policy using figures like "X% chance of death!", since it sounds like a weather forecast and we can't even get those right one day in advance, let alone when determining policy for the entire year. And you can't conclude from absence of public discussion that these figures or expectations weren't discussed privately.
Yes, it would have been better for the policymakers to voice their reservations and motivations in public, but I'm not willing to blame the politicians for not doing that. In order to have a nuanced political discussion, all parties need to play ball. It is counterproductive for a politician to take a well-argued public position when the media only wants ten-second soundbites and actively looks ways to embarrass and undermine said politician, and when the public isn't remotely interested in a nuanced position because the tribe has already spoken.
To me, the Covid response in the West highlights a failure of democracy. That is not the same as a failure of politics, trying to pin all blame for the failure of democracy on the current politicians is just another symptom of the underlying problem. Instead, it is a failure of society at large. It seems we are no longer willing and/or capable to have an honest and open debate about matters of public policy, and that is a sad situation. I'm not even going to try and hint at the wide array of causes and consequences that led us to this point, just expressing dismay that I don't see the situation improving for the better any time soon.