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Because people were turning on them in real-time?
But the thesis was that the governments were doing all of this regardless of the public opinion.
The governments were doing all this while using standard propaganda channels to force public opinion to be in it's favour. That these efforts would grow weaker over time as the disconnect between the government line about the properties of covid and the real-world properties of covid was increasingly noticed by a public that knew more and more people who got covid and then didn't die is unsurprising.
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They weren't checking for what people want most, and doing that, but I think they were checking for angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.
But those were already taking place in 2021. Vaccination centres were getting burned as early as March 2021, and probably the most notable large-scale protests internationally took place around Summer-August 2021. Never saw particular evidence that they did much beyond heightening the anger the normies and the political class felt towards the antivaxxers.
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