Natural Immunity might confer more protection to the individual against covid, but it's a terrible public health policy position if your goal is protect as many people as possible while you have perfectly good vaccines available.

We don't formulate public health policy based on 0 cases of flu or cold or covid. Otherwise we'd all be living in temperature-controlled air-corrected 24/7-monitored government housing pods would reduce the transmission to 0. Maybe those pods are the best public health policy? Because they could ship us food contact-free and let us out for exercise at times determined by an efficiency algorithm?

For those 100m Americans to get that immunity, you had to have a lot of deaths and externalities pushed onto your hospital systems along the way.

This is exaggerated. Here is how I know: roughly half of the hospitalizations that have occurred were mild or asymptomatic cases.

Source:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos...

Quote from article: "In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease."

So you have fear induced by media relentlessly spamming our brains via feeds and doom-scrolling, and people then see the # of hospitalizations and assume that means a doomsday scenario like the film Contagion. If the reality is that our numbers have been misleading or incomplete, then it is impossible for you to accurately measure those externalities you mention. Therefore some rumored externalities should not be the basis for policy that strips people of their rights and livelihood. And it CERTAINLY should never be the basis for fabricating a false dilemma like vaxed vs unvaxed.

How many people got scared about their symptoms and rushed to the hospital because the media caused a panic? Per that source I mentioned, it's entirely possible this happened.

Healthcare staffing costs are shooting up,

Because hospitals are imposing those costs on themselves by firing nurses that are not complying. To the point where some hospitals in NYC are now unable to deliver children.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-hospital-pause...

This is a problem caused by the mandates.

health insurance costs will likely rise across the board.

For years before covid, the common narrative online was always that health insurance companies are bad. It's been known for YEARS that they make record profits and always pass on costs to the customers anyway. In the form of higher premiums, higher deductibles, and shittier services. So why are some on HN now peddling sympathy for them? Those costs are exaggerated and their bottom line is still fat from years of gouging the customers.

Vax passports/documentatio is a whole separate issue, but I'll never understand why Americans are so adamantly against preventative healthcare measures.

Get rid of the mandates tomorrow and say "masking when cases are above N in your area" and I'm sure everyone will be okay with that. No need to impose vaccination mandates anymore - people who want the protection can get the protection voluntarily.

And the small subset of people who cannot, could be taken care of through other creative means like giving them funds to stay at home until the pandemic is officially over. A cost that is a much smaller drop in the bucket compared to this tyranny that is poised to emerge.