China have proved that your beloved lockdowns and masks don’t work.
so if lockdowns don’t work, what was it specifically that led to a recent explosion of cases, hospitalisations and deaths in China? China reported (leaked) 18% prevalence or 1/6. The UK has never managed greater than 8% in the ONS survey.
The area under the death time curve is lower for the UK than it would otherwise have been because the lockdown led to a period of vaccine induced protection from mortality when it was rolled out. Had there been no vaccine, the. Your premise is correct and lockdown would have made no difference. We would likely have seen the original number of deaths projected by Imperial, albeit over a longer period.
The first rollout of vaccines reduced numbers of infections from Wuhan strain. Variant emergence meant that the vaccine-induced neutralisation was lower but morbidity and mortality was much reduced (by about 10x). That still seems to be apparent for XBB. If you have not been vaccinated then you are at the increased risk of morbidity for whichever strain you might catch. Benefit risk is determined by whether adverse outcomes for vaccine outweigh that risk. For adults in general the data shows a positive benefit risk. For the elderly the effect is huge.
Debate is healthy and choice is important, but the science is much more certain now that it was in 2020.