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For the same reason why they needed to promote fear to carry out lockdowns: The public wouldn't tolerate them without the prior propaganda efforts.
I should have clarified this earlier, but when I said vaccine mandates were motivated by the opportunity to politically purge the opposition, this most clearly applies in the US, where vaccine mandates got way further than they did in the UK, mainly because our third round of covid restriction attempts collapsed from the partygate scandal. It's a shibboleth for being red tribe, and blue tribe leaders wanted to hurt the political prospects and economic power of red tribe by removing many of them from well-paid or prestigious employment or at least forcing them to betray their principles to remain employed. But then the conversation drifted to why lockdowns happened in the UK rather than the support for vaccine mandates in the US. But I'm sure you can understand why the idea of unvaccinated healthcare workers is especially corrosive to the government's narrative on covid and vaccines. That's still a political purge, just of the healthcare system first.
Ok we have a problem here, your comments about the government wanting to purge anti-lockdownists, and the papers you provided were all from the UK. But now you are saying actually that is only really in the US?
So are you conceding that the UK government actions were likely not motivated by trying to purge political opponents? And we already established the lockdowns weren't.
And then applying your argument to the US also runs into problems because Covid restrictions there were generally state based not Federal, and they didn't particularly have what the UK had in lockdowns overall. So when you said the vaccine mandates were targeting anti-lockdown people, then you are mixing two different countries. Covid restrictions in the US were very light-touch overall compared to the lockdowns in the UK. And varied state by state and were more severe in Blue cities. If they were targeting Reds that would not be the pattern we would expect to see.
It just seems that you are trying to weave a narrative across different nations with different responses and governance systems in different places and as a result it ends up as an incoherent mess, of who is supposed to be purging who for what reason. I live in the US and the harsher restrictions I had here were mainly from the city not the state or Federal government. And that meant it almost exclusively targeted urban people. If their goal was to purge the Red tribe, for a start they would actually have to find some to purge, and secondly their restrictions put much more of the bulk of compliance on the Blue tribe itself because of that. If they were specifically wanting to disadvantage Reds you would see lesser restrictions where more Blues were (because they were actually not scared, but just trying to hurt the outgroup, so no need to disadvantage the in group) and more (imposed from above) where more Reds were, but that isn't what happened.
The problem here is a conversation about vaccine mandates being motivated by political purges in the US soon turned into one about the motives for lockdowns, a separate policy, in the UK, a separate country. This is because you mentioned "Conservative UK Boomers" and their calls for lockdowns, then I responded to that, perhaps without making clear enough that I don't think the same applies to the UK and the US. Mainly because vaccine mandates never got very far in the UK.
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