With respect,

Decisions have to be made and in the early days surrounding the pandemic PPE for hospitals is an important thing to have. If that is the motivation that is quite literally a medical and health authority decision and also valid. Information in hindsight change things. Triage isn’t politics. You can disagree but I think calling it playing politics is pretty absurd.

Re: Booster shots

So which health authority here then is acting as a political agent? Kind of muddies your perspective. Regardless all authorities don’t explicitly have to agree to be offering good advice. Do we expect everyone to have the right answer all the time? There are also competing interest here. Makes sense for WHO to prefer vaccination go wide. Also makes sense for the US to work to protect its citizens as much as possible, potentially at the expense of the rest of the globe. Does one do more good than the other? How do you quantify that result objectively?

Nothing about the wuhan lab origin is particularly relevant or important as far as the issues of treatment go. I agree this is an entirely political issue, but it is also divorced from what has become politicized as far as COVID treatment and vaccines.

I think it’s a bad faith argument to say the majority of the `political` aspects of the pandemic response are a result of health authorities losing trust because they are acting as political agents.

The counter narrative (if you want to call it that, I don’t know what would be the best thing to call it really) of anti-vax, anti-mask, and alternative (unproven) treatments is decades in the making of a general trend that I do agree is (From an American perspective) a general lack of faith in government. But I also think that a lot of that is political in its inception. And surrounding COVID especially, these are the ideas being amplified by mainstream political figures in an unprecedented way.

There have always been people skeptical of the government. There have always been antivax people. But the flames that are fanning these, especially now are explicitly being done so by political elements for their own personal political gain.

There is barely any defensible basis for the majority of the backlash here. It’s would be kind of funny if it wasn’t so depressing.

You’ve got military personnel making grandiose statements against their vaccine requirements. All of them got several when they enlisted, and there was no issue then for some reason. The anthrax vaccine really did have some major issues (identified pretty much immediately when it was rolled out) but we didn’t have this kind of narrative about it then.

Ultimately this really just reinforces the `politics` aspect to me.

Are there valid areas of debate to have on pandemic response? Absolutely.

Do some of them have political implications? (Boosters)? Sure

Does rejecting (especially) vaccines and masks in spite of the quantifiable data about their efficacy make sense? No.

Does advocating the use of debatably useful substances as an alternative because you’ve chosen to ignore what we do know (for political reasons, in this case your personal politics) make sense? No.

People are allowing their personal politics to override something that isn’t political. The politics are largely coming from outside, especially about pandemic response.