This is the thing that drives me the most nuts about many policy makers: they ignored natural immunity. They ignored that cloth masks (and likely surgical) would do nothing against an aerosol born disease. They ignored the impact of lockdown of society to everyone. The US masking 2 year old kids when the rest of the world masked starting at 6 year old or older.

EDIT: just to add: from what we can see, vaccines help cut down on adverse outcomes due to a covid infection, which is why I'm still pro-vaccine. But many other policies out there are just nonsense.