Your post seems to be continuing this trend. Nobody called anyone “deplorable schmucks” or “puppy kicking grandma killer” but you. Your victimhood really comes out in the language you choose to describe others.
As someone who not only mapped the rise of COVID for Wikipedia before it was mainstream media acknowledged in January 2020 - https://github.com/globalcitizen/2019-wuhan-coronavirus-data - but also had the unique fortune of experiencing (catching) COVID in all of China, Australia and the US, while all countries had irrational response I would classify Australian social paranoia as some of the worst. Absolutely, people were being shamed and attacked and removed from society, employment, etc. if they did not have vaccinations or refused to wear masks. While all countries had irrational response, Australia's was certainly "up there". Furthermore, they turned the whole country in to a prison (you needed 'special permission' to leave, even as an Australian citizen), and virtually nobody complained.
There are no such people so hopelessly enslaved as those who believe they are free. - Goethe
I personally found the recent withdrawl of some of the vaccines - which people were hounded and shamed in to taking in to their bodies - with proven mortality risk, as something of a vindication. None of my family had any vaccines, not because we are against them per se, but because we didn't encounter a legal requirement to do so as we visited the US right after the requirement for travelers was dropped, and had already developed natural resistance through repeated exposure. If we were dealing with a more vicious pathogen, we would have been first in line.
Why wouldn't we want to know how effective (or not) a given intervention is? It feels like a way to avoid embarrassment.
But I'd argue that most of the lessons to be learned are not about virology or the minutiae of masks. They're about the consequences of politicizing something that's not political, of implementing drastic measures with poorly-communicated rationale.
They're of non-physicians spreading their own opinions and misexplainations (however well-intentioned) while condescending to other non-physicians that they're not entitled to their own opinions because they're not a physician. Like, what?
I was talking about revisiting people’s comments on a message board from 4 years ago in an attempt to re-stoke the flamewar conversations everyone claims to be against.
==especially from such a "pro-Science™" crowd.==
Reads like a pretty condescending comment to me.
Specific individuals not "this forum".