"I really wish Goverments were more open. About a year ago I was given the theory that BJ was allowing a controlled amount of covid spread to build natural resistance. As a Plan B incase the vaccines failed, as all companies were working really on the same vaccine.
Scotland spent so long pursuing zero covid and at no point considered that the vaccines might not work."
This is really interesting, and regardless of intention the net effect seems to be that England has better community immunity (in that their previous summer spike never took off the way ours did - ours exceeded the January spike by some distance. We'll see what happens to England in the next few weeks, but I doubt there'll be record levels of infection). In fact, very early on I'm sure Patrick Vallance said in a press conference that they needed low risk people to get it for this reason. It's a shame it all got massively politicised soon afterwards, herd immunity became a dirty word rather than a scientific concept, and genuine scientific debate about the best way forward got shut down in favour of 'clear messaging' about sticking to lockdowns etc.
That second point in the quote is the key one for me - we never had a plan B and had unrealistic expectations about vaccines. For me, it highlights that our 'advisors' didn't quite have the right specialisations and/or we didn't have the breadth of advice that you need in an emergency like this. We seemed to be social sciences/non-infectious disease epidemiologist heavy, with no-one really who understood how coronavirus virus spread works or even the limitations of vaccines (see endless talk of 'elimination strategy' and 'suppressing like measles'). And so we ended up with courses of actions that seemed reasonable on the surface but were ultimately unrealistic, and possibly even counter productive. One more instance where I'm really struggling to understand how a separate 'scottish' approach, rather than using the greater depth of expertise across the UK, has worked for us in any way.