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Notes -
If I remember correctly, the "official" vaccine discourse followed something of a curve. At the beginning, before the vaccine was actually rolled out, the promises around vaccines were indeed quite modest; they were supposed to reduce severity and maybe somewhat hinder transmission, being another tool in the toolpack (which still mainly revolved around lockdowns and NPIs at this point).
At some point around the rollout and early 2021, the vaccine-related claims spun out of control, with vaccines being portrayed as a wonder drug that would essentially considerably reduce severity and also stop transmission; it's very likely a large part of this was wishful thinking related to the idea that one-stop solution that would get us out of the crisis would exist where it was possible to combat COVID and not do the onerous lockdown/restriction cycle that was already getting dumped by the business community. It's not surprising that businesses jumped on the vaccine mandate train very quickly, either.
When this didn't quite turn out as expected, the official institutions - which continued to be unwilling to return to large-scale lockdowns after spring 2021, in most places at least - then turned towards vaccine passports as a Hail Mary, maybe the vaccines would do what the hype discourse claimed they would do if you just tried to put them in as many arms as possible, or it was possible to have your cake and eat it too by having lockdowns only for the demonized unvaccinated and not for the majority of the population that was vaccinated or would presumably get vaccinated as soon as they were prevented from going to the bar or would be under the threat of severance or whatever.
Of course we also know this didn't quite work out this way, so the whole thing was essentially just quietly shelved, and the claims around vaccines implicitly returned to the more modest framework, without it being acknowledged that the hype-and-bust cycle took place.
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