Politicians are (by and large) people who spend a lot of time talking to other politicians, who are sensitive to other people’s expectations, who go with the flow and follow conventional wisdom. They don’t break ranks and do anything radical or innovative alone.
The politician who does otherwise is an unsuccessful politician.
When a government makes a plan to solve some problem, it tends to be the same as his neighbour’s solution.
China was the first territory to react to Covid, and it reacted brutally, with what we now call lock-downs. Total suppression of human movement and interaction and activity, covering an entire city.
This was not the only option nor the most effective one, though the people who copied this solution now claim that it was.
And that’s just it, most of the world copied this approach, because politicians instinctively copy each other.
But if covid had started somewhere else, if the first government to react had been portuguese or venezualan or dutch, the template solution would certainly have been very different. It would have been a less brutal and more effective one. The world might be a very different place today.
That’s exactly it. Epidemiologists know all about this stuff, and have done for decades. I haven’t said anything new or radical. It’s all old ideas that I’ve read up on.
But even today the politicians with the most power (and even a lot of normal intelligent people) are ignorant of this stuff.
Most people can see now that even if vaccination rate is 100%, that is not enough to stop covid.
But still governments (and even intelligent people) are obsessing over increasing the vaccination rate. They are not focusing on the other (more important) stands of disease control. And that’s (according to my argument) because the way China initially reacted was so influential, making people focus on the totalitarian solutions only. So they (lockdowns and forced vaccination) have become the norm globally.