> Effectiveness of lockdowns and mask mandates is still hotly contested, for instance

The fact their effectiveness is still being questioned suggests that we never should have done them in the first place. You don't get to make broad, highly disruptive mandates with almost zero evidence they would even work.

For the mandates to actually be worth it, you should be able to show the data to any reasonable person and they'd immediately see an order of magnitude difference between test & control. The fact you can barely tell florida apart from california is pretty damning. If you need fancy math to see a difference, it wasn't worth it.

> The fact their effectiveness is still being questioned suggests that we never should have done them in the first place.

Not necessarily. Precautionary principle and all when we didn't know much. Mask mandates aren't that disruptive. Lockdowns obviously more disruptive, and definitely justified at the very beginning when we didn't know anything.

The era of the precautionary principle ended the day all the field hospitals closed virtually unused. That should have been the complete end of all mandates. Covid clearly wasn’t as bad as what all these “experts” computer models suggested so there was no reason to continue acting out of such great caution.

Instead governors doubled down. That was the end of “science and data” and the beginning of 2.5 years of stupidity.

In principle, HCQ can be effective against some coronaviruses and not others. Ditto for masks. So I'm not convinced we knew anything specific about COVID-19 just due to prior research, but the precautionary principle suggests being overly conservative in most assumptions.

Fauci actually did mislead the public about masks, but he actually believed they were effective, so he lied to the public claiming their ineffectiveness at first due to fears of shortages.