This is not really true. Certainly for the first COVID strain, and even Delta, the vaccines were quite effective (>60% for the mRNA versions) at preventing transmission, and still >90% effective at preventing hospitalisation and then something like 50% effective in the hospitalised population at reducing death rates (suggesting that they were reasonable effective at stopping you from getting a serious outcome, but if you did have a serious outcome, they were only marginally beneficial.)
That's certainly true, but even back them we were warned of mutations and that protection against infection was unlikely to be long-lived as antibody levels decline.
In terms of long term protection, the vaccines show pretty good effectiveness, at least as good as the flu vaccine, but the problem is the virus mutates so often and will mutate to avoid vaccines, so it will be necessary to offer boosters to this population even if the vaccine lasted a long time.
The data in support of the boosters is flaky. Only proper randomised, double blind, placebo controlled trials were conducted for the first two doses. The third wasn't blinded or placebo controlled and the newer bivalent Omicron vaccines weren't properly tested on humans, just mice. Antibody titers were used to justify approval, rather than protection against severe disease and death.
It appears protection against severe disease and death from natural infection and the older vaccines is still maintained. T-cell immunity appears to be holding up against newer variants. SARS-Cov-2 is very different to influenza. It's probably on the path to becoming another common cold virus. It's possible, HCoV-OC43, a virus which now causes a common cold disease was responsible for the 1889 to 1891 pandemic, which was previously thought to be influenza.
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1751-7915.13889If the above is true, annual boosters are unnecessary. Everyone will be infected when they're very young and get lifelong protection against severe disease. It's true, there will still be old and vulnerable people who die, but that's always been the case. Common cold viruses such as HCoV-OC43 do cause severe disease such as pneumonia, leading to death of the vulnerable, but that's just life.
Broadly agree lockdowns were too late, but at the early stage of the disease it was an unknown, we did not know if we would see healthy 30 year olds collapsing from the disease. So the first lockdown was justifiable in the face of an unknown, possibly deadly virus. And yes we could have looked at Asia to see how their demographics were faring, but (a) the data from China was not trustworthy, and (b) as we have seen there are genotype and cultural differences across ethnicities that impact the behavior of COVID. For instance, Japan has had very low death rates despite having an aging population and low vaccination rates until the after the Tokyo Olympics - about 10% of what the UK has seen.
I think you've missed the point. Random antibody samples showed the spread was already too extensive to eradicate the virus. The fact it was already present across the world, meant there was no chance of eliminating it. Perhaps if China went into lockdown, before it spread from there, it might have been contained, but it was too late by the time it appeared in Europe and America.
I think the effects of long COVID and myocarditis from COVID indicate that it's not as simple as protecting the elderly. It's also very difficult to isolate the elderly from an outbreak like this (think grandma living with parents who are working.) But I do agree that there should have been a more targeted approach, the lockdowns did serious harm and I'm not convinced that the lockdowns past any vaccination program were ever justifiable. I also don't see the point in partial lockdowns, like the UK did during the second wave before Christmas, it was something like you could go to the pub but only if you ate a meal. Lockdowns have to be harsh and brutal if they are going to stop the virus, otherwise you're just slowing the inevitable exponential curve.
You say partial lockdowns were a waste of time, but when the UK originally went into lockdown, there were plenty of countries not in lockdown and people were still allowed to enter the country. It made no sense. Perhaps if the whole wold went into lockdown, it could've been stopped, but that wasn't going to happen.
Long COVID is a complex topic. It's possible some of it is psychological, due to all of the hysteria stirred up around the virus. Now I'm not discounting people's suffering, mental illness is real. It's just it's bad if some of it is caused by the authorities and mainstream media, rather than just the virus.
Myocarditis is also a complication of the vaccine, especially mRNA and is more common in males under the age of 40. There is evidence to show
the risk of myocarditis post vaccination is greater, than that of SARS-Cov-2 in males under 40, especially following Moderna. It's also highly likely it's vastly under-reported.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdfThe idea of vaccinating children, to protect the elderly was always immoral, even when vaccines provided a high degree of protection against transmission. It's like lining up the children to defend the elderly. Medicine has always been about protecting the individual, rather than wider society.