It’s not nearly as black and white as you lay out. Despite evidence of immunity after contracting COVID, the prior administration continued to pursue a vaccination mandate through OSHA. Additionally arbitrary rules and limitations such as the 6’ rule were routinely parroted by public health authorities and state governments. That’s in addition to what another commenter pointed out about the mask flip flopping.

...did you live through the same COVID? Do you not remember when the top researchers colluded to repeatedly bald-faced lie to their peers and the public about the likely origins of the virus?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/scientists-behind-paper-...

I mean we are talking about the successor state to the one that botched the Chernobyl response, it's not hard to imagine a repeat

I'm not sure the public health establishment didn't do more harm than good during COVID, especially with all the politically expedient flip-flopping on masking: First claiming it was unnecessary as a white lie to protect supplies for front-line workers, then promoting cloth masks despite evidence not being able to establish it statistically significantly slows spread, and then insisting on masking children in their formative years who had already been vaccinated or otherwise gained natural protection against COVID.

Remember all the theater around wearing your mask to your restaurant table and then taking it off for your entire meal in an enclosed room with dozens of other people? Or shutting down public parks and beaches but excusing BLM protests because they agreed with their politics?

The Trump admin was cartoonishly inept but the public health experts did plenty to kill their own credibility as well.

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Is your implication that COVID was intentionally created in an American bioweapons lab with the goal of creating something both highly deadly and highly transmissible for use in future conflicts?

Alternatively, that's just an excuse, and he's waging a war because the existential threat to his autocratic kleptocracy by even a modestly successful, somewhat democratic neighboring state with significant inter-country exchange of people and ideas.

Worse yet, this is contained but Putin will use it to argue against foreign actors weakening him further because 'think of the consequences`. I hate how paranoid this timeline has made me.