Did natural immunity work though? Pretty much every active American I know has gotten Covid not once but twice at the least. Of course even in that statement the nuance of what strains etc was lost.

I’ll actually agree that by the time vaccine mandates were made the strains didn’t diverge that much and it should have been perfectly acceptable to show iron clad proof of prior infection as an alternative for vaccine proof (if I’m not wrong that was actually the case in some scenarios).