> Furthermore, while lockdowns may have protected some vulnerable people from exposure to the virus, they may also have placed them at increased risk of future

> Furthermore, while lockdowns may have protected some vulnerable people from exposure to the virus, they may also have placed them at increased risk of future exposure by preventing high levels of herd immunity from establishing broadly across the population. This doesn’t make sense since anyone who is vulnerable now has now had the chance to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, making themselves immune without the dangers that accompany herd immunity through natural infection by the virus. It’s unmentioned in this piece, but the author, Sunetra Gupta, has made false predictions that herd immunity via natural infection was already established for a year now. In July 2020: https://reaction.life/we-may-already-have-herd-immunity-an-interview-with-professor-sunetra-gupta/ https://reaction.life/we-may-already-have-herd-immunity-an-i... She has repeatedly argued against lockdowns based on her now falsified theory of herd immunity already existing. > The critical question, of course, is whether it would have been possible to reduce the mortality and morbidity risks to the vulnerable population at lower cost than lockdowns? Other options were available, such as focused protection, whereby those most at risk from the virus would have been afforded protection whilst those at low risk would be largely allowed to go about life as normal Focused protection appears to be more faith than anything else - the belief that there must have been some other option that would have still saved lives while allowing the young and healthy to party and work as normal. I have never seen someone explain how focused protection could be implemented successfully - while I can imagine a theoretical quarantine of the elderly and obese in special zones with border control, it seems incredibly totalitarian and impossible even for the the Chinese to consider, much less Western governments. Widespread deployment of an experimental and untested vaccine would have made more sense than relying on focused protection - after all, it turned out that most of the vaccines except for Sanofi worked fine and if we had gambled and produced and vaccinated everyone first with an random mix of vaccine candidates rather than waiting for Phase 3 trials, COVID-19 deaths would have been greatly reduced in hindsight.