beating a dead horse

All I said was that the measures that have been tried for almost a year now have not worked. 

 This is the comment about which I strongly disagree, and which I finally decided to stop arguing with Beagles about because reason was falling on stony and unfertile ground.

Lockdown certainly does work.  It does not wipe out the pandemic in one fell swoop but it greatly reduces the number of cases and of deaths.  Look at the rates in states that have locked down vs states that haven't.  Note how the rates go up in states when they stop their lockdown, and how they go down again once they put that lockdown back on.  It's as plain as the nose on your face.

The argument that the lockdown trashes the economy is a valid one.  It makes more sense than claiming that the lockdown has no effect, but it's awfully long on opinion and short on facts.  The pandemic crushed the economies whether you locked down or not.  Sweden which proudly, and it turns out foolishly, had no lockdown has finally had to put one on because too many people were dying.

China has pretty much defeated the pandemic.  Of course they were able to lock people in their own houses sealed with a swatch of tape, bringing food to their door, and woe betided anybody caught outside.

Had we been able to do that, maybe we would have stamped the virus out in May, and be living a regular life now, and likely a majority of the half million Americans who have died would still be alive.

But you can't get some Americans to even wear a damn mask let alone suffer a few weeks of house arrest.  The US has 4 percent of the world's population yet it accounts for 20 percent of the world's covid deaths.  If you are an American you are five times more likely to die of covid than if you lived elsewhere.

Just read an interesting article about the pandemic year.  It's pretty long but it is a long story no?    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year

Seems to me if I was bringing my truck into the garage and one mechanic, who had been to mechanic school, offered me an explanation that made sense, while his buddy just shrugged his shoulder and said, "I don't know," that I would chose the first guy to work on my truck.

They have already done extensive testing of the vaccinations, and it turns out that they are 95 percent effective.  They work.