[ZeroGravitas]

I thought he was very clear that he wasn't making a "least harm" case. And I think you are misrepresenting the side that decided on lockdowns. The tradeoffs and risks were a constant topic of discussion.

Economic, schooling, mental health, excercise, business, these factored into every decision. The bend the curve thing was literally saying "we will let some people get this disease and only apply the brakes when we fear that the sheer number of people getting it will overwhelm the hospitals and cause even more deaths." Some jobs were considered "essential" some werent. Did that impact some people more than others? Kids were seen as being at low risk of dying which factored into things like school being open. Just constant, non-stop discussion about trade-offs and risks across multiple domains.

Lockdown vs no lockdown isn't a real division, each lockdown strategy was different for incedental reasons alone.

[btilly]

As soon as he talked about what he would vote for, and what people should be able to vote for, he was implicitly talking about the greatest good across the population (as measured by voting).

If he had been talking about unilaterally violating lockdowns, then your characterization that he was putting his interests above the life of others becomes fair. But he didn't do that.

As for strategies, he was arguing that he wouldn't want strict borders and strong lockdowns, with full vaccination before opening up. Australia and New Zealand did this. The complex tradeoffs discussion that you remember from the USA was not involved.

In the USA, a weak federal response at the start meant we began behind with endemic COVID. The most we could do was "flatten the curve" - we couldn't stop lots of people getting it. Then with vaccinations we could choose which lives to save. And so the discussions you remember. But that is entirely irrelevant to what he says he wouldn't have wanted.

Related, the fact we talked about lots of stuff didn't mean we were actually thinking very well. For example internal memos about prioritizing "essential workers" was to create some "racial justice" in early vaccinations - they didn't want to only be vaccinating old and mostly white people. And so we prioritized healthy young people blacks and hispanics over people who needed it more. And probably wound up with more dead blacks and hispanics than the "unjust" method. But hey, we got early vaccinations into a politically correct mix of arms!

(In case you didn't guess, I'm not a fan of stupid things done to be politically correct.)

That said, I believe most Democrats would have preferred "doing it right" if that was possible.