The fact that you're using the word "deplorables" kind of gives away your views here. There's room for debate but going for herd immunity would have been utter insanity to be frank. We know how bad uncontrolled Covid would get from places like Italy early in the pandemic and it wasn't pretty. You're basically saying you'd be willing to accept millions more people in the United States dying of this disease so we can maybe get back to a functional economy in 3 months. And the deaths would increase as we ran out of things like ventilators and asthma medication that we're actually shown to be effective treatments. Your view is incredibly callous.

Wasn’t the point to try to protect the more vulnerable?

Realise that we solidly failed to do this with all our masks and measures.

I’m not at all convinced that by those who argue it was not possible to apply focused protection. We spent so much on unfocused protection. What if we took those resources — or even just a fraction of them — and redirected them to those at most need.

The point of masks was always to limit community spread, principally to prevent a situation where hospitals are so full you can't treat regular issues like car crash victims. In practice that means you do try to keep vulnerable people out of the hospital but it's not the main concern if you're goal is to prevent a really bad public health situation.

Masks and social distancing absolutely had an effect on the situation, and the main reason we had to do unfocused solutions as you call them is because people infected with Covid did not always have symptoms, and it was extremely contagious. If algae is exponentially covering a pond, it covers half the pond the day before it covers the whole pond. The exponential nature of infection is really hard to reason about and I think people like you really aren't understanding that at the time, with no vaccines, the only way to protect the most vulnerable was to reduce community spread. You also don't have a magic eight ball telling you who might get hospitalized. We had really fit people dying in two weeks. There was no way to tell who was and wasn't vulnerable.

ah, I see. You have a one-way view of political leanings. Got it. You're not only deplorable if you question "the science," you're deplorable if you use the word "deplorable."

also, skipping over the most egregious thing of all: censoring anyone who suggested lab-leak.