Also, my OP was and still is directed toward liberals in both the common American usage and the broadest philosophical sense. The pandemic is a world-historic crisis, yes, but it’s also a world-historic test of core liberal principles at a time when governments, corporations, public health authorities, and other powerful bureaucratic organizations are demanding unprecedented submission and sacrifice from ordinary people in the name of the common good.
At a time in which liberalism is under attack around the world from increasingly repressive autocracies, from both ostensible allies of the US like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to adversarial peer powers like Russia and (most frighteningly) China, to countries like Hungary and Turkey; to, as liberals will be the first to tell you, Donald Trump and the Republican Party in general and right-wing extremists in general at home, and yes, the more extreme elements among BLM, Antifa, and the emerging Far Left, you would think that liberals would be standing up for, well, liberalism.
If you’re willing to sacrifice your ostensible “liberal democratic values” to a bunch of unelected technocrats with authoritarian tendencies who are standing in for hapless and incompetent political “leaders”, then I question your level of commitment to either liberalism or democracy.
And I thought the initial were lockdowns were dumb. They just weren't worth it and they were too difficult to enforce to be effective. Mask and vaccine mandates are reasonable approaches. It's a reasonable power for a government to have those powers when people want government guaranteed health indemnity and seat belt mandates.
