I also heard, their vaccination program wasn’t that good as elsewhere. Everybody in my bubble in Germany got corona at least once. Everybody were vaccinated at least twice. All cases in all age groups were not worse than average cold.
1. Mask mandates - dumb - people who didn’t want to wear them weren’t wearing them properly and most were wearing completely ineffective cloth masks. I travelled a lot and you were allowed to take your mask off while eating on a plane. So what good was requiring a mask?
2. Vaccine mandates - everyone agrees that the vaccines don’t stop you from getting or spreading Covid. But it does help prevent severe cases. So if people decide not to get vaccinated, it’s on them.
Raise their insurance rates and don’t give them extra sick time.
I would have been in compliance with my company’s mandate if I had only gotten the one shot J&J 3/2021 even though six months later, everyone agreed that it wasn’t effective against the variants and you should get a booster. No one would be crazy enough to propose that you must get a shot every six months. I did so voluntarily.
Yeah I caught Covid after vaccinations and boosters. It really was no worse than a cold.
The "pointless ceremony" of "masks while not eating" works out better.
I think because we see ourselves as "sick or not sick" and "infected or not infected", people are not very calibrated to think or care about magnitude of exposure.
Public health prophylactic measures can have real impact on both large and small scales, even when imperfectly followed. It's the statistics of the thing. Terrorism measures are stil theatre IMHO because they have such a lumpy and weird distribution.
Not every context is the same.
I'm willing to acknowledge that the data is not great, but I think the action is more or less "plausible" and IMHO the suffering is small.
The knock on affects is that the Democrats were not doing themselves any favors in the election. It’s bad politics.