I think you're making a lot of uncharitable assumptions about what I'm saying, which definitely isn't that it would have been useless to get everyone vaccinated sooner. Taking all available precautions to reduce transmission is of course what should have been done.

I remember people talking about herd immunity as an argument that we should avoid any lockdowns so everyone gets infected and get it over with sooner, because they will then have enough resistance to end the disease in the population. What I mean by 'it turned out to be too infectious' is that the pandemic now continues despite most people having gotten sick, not that efforts to reduce transmission did nothing to help save people.

The main point I'm wondering about here is more about the current role of vaccines, now that almost everyone has an immune system that is familiar with covid. I'm not even asking about this rhetorically, just skeptical that the same logic still applies that did earlier.