It’s not a “conspiracy theory”, they outright said (over and over and over) that we need to stop COVID lockdowns, masking, etc and “get back to normal” for the sake of the economy. This wasn’t some secret and it was not that long ago! The concern was more about the impact on the economy, on whether the line went up or down, than on human lives. (Random sampling of articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.)

COVID hasn’t gone away and it’s still killing people, even with vaccines. (Sure would help if people would take the vaccines, though.)

The only material difference between now and 2020 is we have some handle on this thing, it’s not completely overwhelming our health care system and it’s better understood in general so we can treat and prevent it better.

(Edit: actually there’s a second material difference. The disease is much deadlier now than it was at the start of this. )

However, there’s also a difference in that three (or four) years have passed. The opposition to measures against COVID has largely won–the people calling the shots decided to join the war on disease on the side of the disease.

We can do this, though! We could do something about it. During the COVID lockdowns we actually (accidentally) wiped out multiple entire strains on the Flu! They’re dropping one of the strains from the Flu shot because it doesn’t exist anymore (in the wild at least). However, i worry it could go the other way as well. If this attitude about COVID takes hold in general we could make disease worse for everyone.

Here’s a long article that talks about this: https://johnsnowproject.org/insights/endemic-sars-cov-2-and-the-death-of-public-health/