"Nobody cares about Covid anymore"

You have multiple times now run away from a simple question about vaccines. The rest of your post is an obvious attempt at deflection and bringing up irrellevent previous posts and deliberating misrepresenting them.

Do you accept the evidence for vaccines re: reduction of severe covid? Because it is impossible to debate the argument you are currently making without reference to their effectiveness.

There was lots of news reports and studies into the variants, Kent was one of the first that had increased R vs. the Wuhan strain but multiple other variants were being tracked before that, they weren't different enough or spread enough to deserve their own classification (and there is still thousands of strains today).

Your memory of variants is very wrong.

Delta was both highly infectious and severe, it lengthened lockdowns by about 6 months. Omicron was more similar to the Wuhan strain but with increased infectivity and outcompeted Delta. If Delta hadn't happened we'd have reopened in Summer 2021 after the vaccine rollout was mostly done, even with Delta, the vaccines enabled much more freedoms than in 2020 (it also coincided with research about reinfection rates whether post virus or post vaccine caused by the human immune system shedding coronavirus antibodies after 6'ish months).

You don't know if we would have ended up like Hong Kong or not.

For starters it's a very high population density, high rise city.

How did they open up in the UK and everywhere else before us then?

You are free to believe what you like about vaccines, unlike you and others, I don't obsess over them. But let us not pretend that it was vaccines that released us here in Ireland from restrictions....if that were the case it would have happened in Sept 2021...but was Jan 2022 before all restrictions were dropped. It is an out an out lie to suggest otherwise.

Wait now...you said it was the vaccines that allowed us drop our restrictions...I said it was the mildness of Omnicron.

By Sept 2021 we were at approx 95% vaccination rate.

Why weren't restrictions dropped in Sept 2021?

The ending of restrictions had little to do with vaccines or Omicron. It was a political decision to end them, as bringing them in at the start was.

Is that so? I mean they pumped us full of every minute detail of corona info all day every day. You telling me they held back the 'real' information that we would all believe and rally behind if only they had released it? I don't know about that...

That could well be true and I honestly don't know, although why they wouldn't share this information should be a worry.

There's no doubt introducing restrictions was a political decision because the data wasn't there, even for the experts to make an informed decision (or so we've been told to date). In fact, restrictions and lockdowns went against many pandemic response plans that had been worked on since the Swine flu pandemic in 2009.

The lifting of restrictions was again a mostly political decision. The general population had more less stopped listening to the advice and had unofficially ended restrictions long before the government moved to officially end them. We were one of the most vaxed countries in the world and even the boosters had a high uptake. As a country we had done all we could do. We saw Europe opening up during that summer with the Euros being played and normal life returning yet we were somehow an outlier that needed more restrictions for longer.

It's clear we had a government working under an "abundance of caution" mantra long past the point it was actually necessary. There was only so long the economic taps could be left off and that really squeezed towards budget 2022.

That is all lovely and all that...

But answer the question. Why didn't we open in Sept 2021?

This is what you said today...a few hours ago.

"But let's be clear, no amount of wishcasting changes the fact that it was the vaccines allowed lockdowns and restrictions to go"

Just answer that very simple question. No need to spend hours trawling thru your old posts...you said the above today.

There would have been many more deaths without the vaccines. Fact.

Why is this still being debated.

Debate the things that are debatable such as were the lockdowns worth it instead.

Nothing to do with Omicron, lots to do with vaccines.

Bringing in restrictions was indeed a political decision, in that politicians would be responsible if the health service was overwhelmed and people were dying in their thousands.

Slightly odd that people use the success of restrictions in avoiding mass deaths as evidence that restrictions weren't needed.

It's like me saying my kids have never had measles or diphtheria so I don't know why I bothered giving them all those vaccines.

Putting the word "fact" at the end of a sentence doesn't make it fact.

Fact.

How much money and resources were spent giving Covid shots and boosters to people at no risk from Covid?

What could that money and resourcing have achieved if targeted at some other heath issues?

Time for a grown-up conversation and review of all the money spent over the 2 years and what was actually achieved. Money and resources are finite - there is a lost opportunity cost to spending them on one particular issue, but that's basically what happened for 2 years. We are starting to see the impact of that right now.

That is because we had the pandemic of the unvaccinated 5%. Let's not forget that cohort who at all cost wanted to be in charge of their own medical decisions, such an inappropriate freedom in a modern western democracy these days.

Again, that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. There's no data to suggest mass deaths were avoided by shutting down the country, zilch, nil, nada.

It's very clear restrictions and lockdowns were political tools used and not based on any hard science. I don't know why that's such a controversial statement to be making. There's clear evidence now that the worst trolley crisis in the States history is unfolding right now. Hospitals are genuinely struggling and patients are dying yet it's business as usual for the government. Why is that do you think? The sad truth is they don't really care in normal times how the health service performs or how many people die on trolleys but by god COVID seemed to focus there minds for a period of time on a single issue and that's having significant knock-on effects now.

You've also made the all too common mistake of mind reading stuff that wasn't in my post. I'm not against vaccines, far from it. We would be a poorer world without any vaccines.

It's a clear fact that even with 90+ coverage of the population and almost 100% of the vulnerable cohorts vaxed there was still no appetite from our government to lift all restrictions. Now, tell me, why was that?