"Some people are dead" sounds bad, but if you think about it some "people are dead" from lack of vaccine mandates too. So you really have to do the math, and the math is actually pretty clear on the whole. Then you can get more sophisticated and break it down by age group.

Yes like I said, we won't reckon with it, we'll continue to argue about if more people were killed than not killed by the mandates.

Once you break it down by age group, you find that the vast majority of people at significant risk from COVID voluntarily took vaccines shortly after they became available, so mandates could have had little effect in that cohort. Meanwhile, the mandates have lasted the longest on college campuses, where the risk calculus tilts most strongly against vaccination for COVID. So even if we're going to engage in a kind of naive "how many deaths from COVID were prevented" analysis as the sole criterion for evaluating the success or failure of mandates, the question is still potentially quite tricky. And that's without getting into the second order effects of throwing many people out of work without unemployment benefits, or cutting down the numbers of healthcare workers, both of which led to some number of preventable deaths which again would be difficult to calculate.

I am struggling to see how the risk calculus tilts strongly against vaccination for college campuses. What are you saying?

College campuses have staff and students of all ages. They should be a safe place for people even that are unable to get vaccinated due to medical issues. The risk of myocarditis is higher with a COVID infection than the vaccine.

> I am struggling to see how the risk calculus tilts strongly against vaccination for college campuses. What are you saying?

Adolescents and young adults are at highest risk for complications from the vaccine, and at the same time at almost the lowest risk of a severe case, a reduction in the odds of which is the only benefit conferred by the vaccines.

> They should be a safe place for people even that are unable to get vaccinated due to medical issues.

Mandates have nothing to do with this, because the vaccines do not prevent transmission or confer any herd immunity benefit whatsoever.

> The risk of myocarditis is higher with a COVID infection than the vaccine.

I don't believe this is true, given that a massive population study in Israel in 2020 pre vaccines found no heightened risk of myocarditis (although it does seem clear COVID infection can raise risks of cardiac/vascular issues more generally). However, even granting that it was the case, the comparison is rather pointless because the risks are not mutually exclusive, but rather additive.

Worldwide, there have been over 7m reported deaths from COVID.

Assuming that's over 2 years, then it represents 6% of expected annual global deaths.

Yes, thanks for demonstrating what I meant by "not reckoning" with it.

Some people are dead because of anything.

Alone that is an entirely unuseful realization.

We need adjusted hazard ratios to make rational comparisons.

It's absolutely a useful realization since there were many things we could have and should have done, that would have been cost-free, if only people were a little more willing to admit that the vaccines did confer meaningful rates of harm.