The lesson was not that vaccines are bad imho. I do not live in the US, so I just find it tiresome to listen to you guys blaming everything on people. There was no right way.
You don't assume good intent from the US and its institutions, fine, but other countries also rolled out vaccines, are they all bought and paid by pharma companies? Is that really the argument?
Just look at measles, to stop spreading it to children who cannot take the vaccine due to other health issues you need almost every children that can be vaccinated to be vaccinated, otherwise the disease spreads.
It's not a really hard concept to grasp. It was crisis time, you don't get to play with lives at that point due to your individualistic convictions.
Stop thinking about individuals, think about systems, and societies.
Given that people were refusing basic instructions (keeping distance, for example); that people dying of COVID in a hospital didn't believe the disease was real due to political influences; how do you think governments and their healthcare systems would be able to track if someone had natural immunity or not? There's no way, the only answer is: vaccinate as many people as possible to cover for uncertainties.
Again, it's a numbers game, in a fast moving crisis there's no opening for individualised actions, you are part of a larger whole and the larger whole required for people to get vaccinate to stamp off the crisis.
All healthcare resources were stretched thin during the height of the pandemic, your proposal is to add yet another resource-intensive test? For what exactly? So people could skip taking the jab? Don't you see any issues with the cost-benefit analysis of this? Not even accounting for the fact of how easy would be to defraud it.
People were faking vaccination cards, faking a blood test showing antigens would be another very common fraud. You cannot trust people when the consequences are much greater than any individual issue...
> Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.