It's not that it was heavy handed. But it was completely nonsensical.
For example here restaurants were open, but they had to close at 19. So instead of spreading the clientele over more hours, they were always 100% full.
Also, they CUT ⅔ of public transport rides, so they were incredibly overcrowded. People with real jobs that can't be done from home still had to go to work. BUT they put stickers on the floor telling people to keep distance. Also hired people to be at crowded stops to spray hand sanitizers on who wanted it, and tell people to keep distance (while seeing them having to push their way in).
In general all the restrictions were about the "having fun" stuff, but not about the "go to work" stuff. Even companies had no obligation to let people who could work from home stay at home. Some companies kept having their offices full.
Oh and let's not forget the recommendations of staying home if you so much as sneezed. But you wouldn't get paid. How did they expect people to pay their rent?
I could go on for hours with this. The bullshit measures that were marketed as "what the scientists are telling us to do" did a lot of harm to the trust that the general population puts into science.
A decent chunk of the pandemic response was politicians power tripping in the name of The Science and later having to roll things back, either because of public backlash (eg hotlines to encourage snitching on their neighbors), because it was actually illegal (requiring all large businesses to have their employees vaccinated or tested weekly), or because of politics (initially telling the public that masks were ineffective, then tripling down on mask mandates, Harris saying the vaccine could not be trusted based on Trump talking about its efficacy).
There was also dumb stuff like social media suppressing mention of covid, even to this day youtubers use euphemisms to refer to that period.
To me it seems perfectly understandable how people who aren't actually involved in science might mix up The Science and actual science after all the political nastiness of those years, especially when we add on top all of the awful pop science reporting from the past decades.
Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed.
And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn't want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.
Wrong they did that to me. Not a small company either. Yeah you can play games with “we won’t fire you, we’ll just stop paying you and won’t allow you to work”.
It’s like they watched Office Space and thought they’d “Milton” everyone.
My point as a Brit was it seemed a bit heavy handed in the US. In the UK we didn't really have that and still got most people vaccinated.
It would have made more sense if the vaccines actually stopped catching it and transmission but they don't really, they mostly just seem to reduce the harm when you catch it. In terms of not spreading it to others you are better isolating than relying on the vaccines - I've had that as a practical issue with my late 80s mum who I visit. Although I've had 4 jabs I've still had it caught it twice since, and have avoided giving it to her by testing if I feel ill and staying away. Which is kind of to say some of the politicians views on it were heavy handed and a bit iffy scientifically.
From a philosophical perspective, I don't see how the vaccine mandates for public jobs is appreciably different than vaccine requirements for public school that already exist.
As far as the China lab goes, there were plenty of scientific papers that studied the China leak theory, though I personally don't know what they found.
The difference between the vaccines you're talking about lies in their development time: The one in school have been (tested) around for decades before getting mandatory.
The COVID vaccines have now been around for 4 years now, and there is no evidence they are appreciably more dangerous than those other vaccines that took longer to develop.
