I'm appalled by Biden's careless statement. But I can't find the Fauci quote in that article (likely hampered by pop-ups). I do agree that authorities have been pretty reckless in their promises.

I updated the link to an archived version.

Fauci and the CDC were a little more careful, but they insinuated effectively the same thing with vaccination induced herd immunity. Of course, we now know the vaccines do nothing for herd immunity, and it seems only infection actually does anything in this regard. I don't have the time to dig up everything every time I need to make an argument, and I wish there was a proper repository of information for this stuff - and that again, is a failing of the government.

> and it seems only infection actually does anything in this regard

Infection doesn't either. The effect of infection is stronger wrt to spread for a few weeks or months but that difference isn't a long term thing. That's not how you reach herd immunity, it's how you reach seasonality.

Do we have any proof of people getting re-infected at a population level, or even any proper studies of individual re-infection? Because a lack of re-infections is what I think would constitute a basis for building herd immunity.

That basis is gone, no study required. Reinfections have long ceased to be noteworthy events. But yeah, there are also studies. None as elaborate and big as, say, a vaccine phase 3, because there aren't really any decisions swiftly based on the exact value of reinfection probabilities, but enough to show that there's no reason to assume that there will be less reinfections than with any other endemic cold.

> Reinfections have long ceased to be noteworthy events.

How long is long? This was published a little over a month ago:

Protective immunity after recovery from SARS-CoV-2 infection

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Yeah, that's all about quantifying something well known, not "stop the press, there's been a reinfection!"

You said:

> The effect of infection is stronger wrt to spread for a few weeks or months but that difference isn't a long term thing. That's not how you reach herd immunity, it's how you reach seasonality.

The authors of that study said:

> Community immunity to control the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic can be reached with the acquired immunity due to either previous infection or vaccination.

I haven't seen anything yet that says protection after infection wanes all that much. I see a lot of "we don't know how long it will last", but it seems to last as long as we have data for so far.

Delta and Omicron changed things a bit, didn't they?

As you argueing against vacvine mandates, lock downs, vaccine passports and geberal restrictions, what would be your counter proposal? No restrictions and let the Pandemic run its natural course? We all sae how that would look like in Italy, Spain, Brazil, New York...

I didn't say that vaccines were supposed to transmission pre-Delta, did I? Just that overall vaccines were, and are, more effective against Alpha and whatnot. And even then it wasn't really expected to stop transmissions to 100%.

Still the question remains to be answered: What are our alternatives, assuming we don't want overloaded health systems? Because just doing nothing wpuld be disaster.