When I say they followed the playbook they developed, I mean things like this from 2005.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pdf/professionals/hhspandemicinfluenzaplan.pdfThere are lots of documents you can read like this, and when you do you'll find that most of what we did was outlined in these plans going back decades.
I agree that in hindsight a lot of it was probably useless. We probably didn't have good enough models to guide any of our actions (see this for example
https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/have-we-been-thinking-about-the-pandemic-wrong-the-effect-of-population-structure-on-transmission/). We were working off of hypotheses that had never been tested in any real way in the past century (e.g., the effect of masking or large-scale lockdowns). Some of it was just run of the mill "problems with science" like the whole idea behind aerosols vs droplets (read this, for example
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/). You're reading a lot of intent into it that I don't think is warranted.
You should also be more circumspect about your arguments - this statement "Quarantining and testing healthy people was never done before" is false. The whole idea behind quarantine is for people who may be ill but are not. Mandatory quarantines comes from the practice of keeping sailors under isolation and observation for forty days when they enter a port. That's different than isolation which is for people who are sick. "Shutting down large swaths of the economy was never done before" is also false. Much of this was done during the Spanish Flu pandemic. If you amend it to "in the past century" I'd agree.
I see consistency because I've gone back and looked. We did what we said we were going to do for thirty years. We just never had to try any of the crap before. It is incorrect to say people "had no support for doing these things." There is an entire field of literature and study which attempted to come up with answers to question of "what do we do when the next pandemic comes?" When, not if. I believe you are under-informed here.
Turns out
a) managing a pandemic is hard
b) medicine is hard
c) public policy is always clouded by political opportunism
d) a lot of this stuff is difficult-to-impossible to measure anyway
e) some populations aren't willing or able to engage in general self-sacrifice
The part of your post about willful attack campaigns and personal discrediting is kinda crap. There's been a ton of really good publications showing what I would call "dissenting" data, especially in the larger masks, lockdown, modeling etc. areas (for example, here's a good review on lockdown stuff
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more). You've probably never heard of most of them, because you don't really pay attention (not a criticism) and because they don't make waves in the media. Loudmouths who make incredible claims, lead campaigns against the government, and generally make waves make headlines. The doctor I linked above who fought hard to correct the misunderstanding in the literature about aerosols vs droplets is perhaps the biggest dissenter of the past three years, and you never heard of her. And she was effective.
I don't agree with a federal vaccine mandate, so I'm not sure why its relevant. Again, this would be more productive if you kept the lines of inquiry clearer. You're all over the map.
