The best protection based on my knowledge of biochemistry would be natural immunity to the current variant in circulation.
The clear public health trend seems to be that we're going to see 2-3 revs of the vaccine booster per year, not that we're going to depend on natural immunity. I think it is almost certain that most COVID deaths were front-loaded and this will look almost exactly like flu vaccines in 3 years.
I also think you've set up a straw man to knockdown when you equate being skeptical to "question[ing] the medical establishment without data". There's no shortage of data out there on and around this topic. You can search on PubMed and literally read for weeks.
As to searching on pubmed and reading for weeks: that's the problem! The vast majority of people are not qualified to read the scientific literature. You need extensive training to learn how to read literature and evaluate it properly. This is especially true for medical/biology research. Learning to be proficient in that world (medical biology/public health literature) is the price of entry for being effective at changing policies. The Skeptics don't always win.
Agree to disagree but I’m all for people reading and researching on their own. Nobody understands the literature the first go, that happens with time.
I suppose it's a loaded term has a wide range of connotations, perhaps the point about not giving more fuel to "anti-science" groups like flat-earthers and hard line antivaxxers is justified.
But then I couldn't shake the feeling that the criticism of "bad science" is justified -- what you described is basically scientists making political and policy decisions, and dispensing not-exactly-true statements to the public. That may not be "bad science" for the reason that it's not science at all -- the scientist is tasked with being a politician, and we all know what politicians do.
The problem is that to outsiders (like me), there's really no way we can tell which hat the "Scientist" is wearing. I personally think that scientists trying to pretend to be politicians is going to backfire badly in the long run, no amount of policing against non-scientists bad mouthing "science" is going to fix that.
The fundamental problem is, without a full-blown censorship system to silence skeptics (whether justified or not), there's really no a good way to prop up the authority of the scientific establishment unless they stop telling white lies and establish authority based on a track record of speaking objective truths.
Adding on, immunity declines over time, so to maintain it would either mean reinfection or booster…
I think what you're trying to say is that you believe there is an adequate enough case for people who had prior infection to avoid what they believe is an unnecessary medical procedure which may have some risk. And, scientifically, you believe it's absolutely certain that in this specific situation, prior infection immunity provides very good protection, enough to override any benefits we might see that happen at very high vaccination rates.
Hope that's a good summary....
Are you a scientist?
You made a number of statements about what is good and bad science, but some of the reasoning you make doesn't completely add up. In science nobody has epistemic certainty, but scientists and public health people act as if they do. In reality public health decisions are made using imperfect information and balance utilitarian and emotional concerns, as well as prior knowledge of patient compliance. Sometimes it may be necessary to not change a message, even if it's somewhat wrong, too quickly.
The calculus is very simple at this point. I believe CDC and others are saying that the additional risk from taking the vaccine is very very small, and the marginal benefit of having even people with prior infection get vaccinated presents a greater (overall) health outcome (presumably in the form of people who had infection immunity but still were re-infected, and then infected others).
Beyond that I don't think anybody has enough scientific data that is certain enough to say that you're right in your statements, and I think it's pretty poor taste to just keep attacking people who disagree with you as doing "bad science". Science is a subtle art, and anyway, public health is an entirely different field that has to concern itself with effective communication and people-emotions and ethics, so sometimes what CDC announcements may not be identical to what the state of the art of science is saying.
I think making a simpler and weaker point would work better. I'd criticize the media for unnecessarily creating additional fear, uncertainty, and doubt, around COVID (there was a lot of early reporting about how omicron was going to destroy the world, that was entirely baseless speculation). And too many people, both media and generally, are quick to criticize people who don't "follow the CDC to the letter", especially around vaccines. I think that kind of cropped up politically in the US after the unnecessary autism/vaccine scare and ended up representing a dividing line.
BTW, I'm an ex-scientist, worked in medical biology for decades, and I don't think many vaccines (flu, covid) are nearly as effective as the medical establishment suggests (look at the numbers of people who died of flu even in years with very high vaccination rates). And people do have significant side effects from getting vaccinated, but very rarely are the side effects more dangerous than the value of being vaccinated (in cases of flu and covid), which is why I support them. Finally, I think that herd immunity doesn't actually work in diseases like flu or covid. So I have some sympathy to your message but ultimately, just get vaccinated and boosted unless you can truly articulate some huge risk to your personal biology.