> Is that correct?

No, not really. Instead of walking your points I can summarise my position on this issue as it does not really differ from my position on most other issues.

My starting point is objectivity and as such I dislike narrative. When SARS2 became a thing it was woven into a number of narratives, one of which has now become dominant in many western countries. This narrative revolves around a collectivist technocratic approach to tackling what is deemed to be a severe threat against public health. The technocracy gets to dictate how people are to act, when they are to act, with whom they are allowed to interact and when they have to refrain from interacting with anyone. Dissenters are quickly labelled and attempts are made to publicly shame those who oppose. The tools of the technocracy are deemed to be highly effective and, again, dissenters are labelled and shamed. The problems with this approach are manifold:

- SARS2 is not a severe threat for large swaths of the population - this became clear early on in the pandemic and has been clear ever since.

- liberal democracy and technocracy do not mix, the former depends on dissent and discussion to reach a consensus while the latter can not tolerate dissent. Most western countries have liberal democratic traditions in one form or another, most people like it that way and want to keep these traditions alive.

- the tools of the technocracy are not nearly as effective - and in some cases not effective at all, or worse (e.g. forcing people to shelter in place, not allowing them to go outdoors) - as stated but those who point this out are quickly marked as dissenters, labelled and shunned. The same is done to anyone who suggests alternatives to the officially mandated tools.

- authoritarian powers, once gained, are hard to give up.

Once the epidemics and the pandemic are over - in a year or 2 - an overview of the pros and cons of the different strategies should be made based on real data (i.e. raw verified data) by neutral observers (if such can be found). What I expect that overview to show is that the costs of the more authoritarian measures - strict lockdowns, school closures, severe limits to personal contacts - ended up being higher than the benefits. Those costs can be expressed in lives lost to (substance/physical) abuse, loneliness, estrangement and other social impacts leading to an increase in suicides. They can be expressed in the loss of academic achievement due to school closures leading to a lowering of future prospects for the affected. As tends to be the case these impacts are not equally spread over all classes of society, the lower classes are hit much harder than the middle and higher.

With all these things in mind it should be now be clear that for me the issues are not so much related to whether the vaccines are useful or not or whether masking works or not. If the vaccines are shown to work people will take them without the need for a dictate from the authorities to do so. Even if they are shown to only be marginally effective those in the most vulnerable groups will still take them to lower their personal risk. Locking down society has not been proven to be effective in reducing the spread of transmission [1,2] while it has a marked impact on social well-being as well as economic activity. The Swedish example shows that people voluntarily adjust their behaviour to limit the risk of personal exposure without a need for the authorities to intervene. People make risk assessments every day, some of them rational - people tend to not cross busy motorways since they know they probably won't survive - and other irrational. A policy based on informing people of the true risks (which was hard to do in the beginning of the pandemic but a lot easier a few months in), providing means - informational, material, medical and economical - to lower those risks and a limited number of targeted actions to keep essential services running is compatible with a liberal democratic political tradition and does far less damage to society than an authoritarian regime of lockdowns and forced medical procedures.

The authoritarian approach might fit countries with an authoritarian political tradition, China or - earlier - the Soviet Union being prime examples of such. Western countries tend(ed) to pride themselves on not being 'like China' or 'like the Soviet Union'. I'd like to keep it that way, if I want to live in an authoritarian state there are plenty of such to move to. I did not do so, instead I moved from one liberal democracy to another.

[1] https://www.hhs.se/sv/forskning/sse-corona-economic-research...

[2] https://academic.oup.com/cesifo/article/67/3/318/6199605