I agree that this is how conservatives will reinvent the history of the pandemic (boldface mine):

The whole thing was massively overblown. Yes there were some excess deaths, but the official numbers are huge exaggerations, because they don’t take into account [insert some bizarre pseudo-scientific statistical mumbo jumbo here].

Also too, locking down the whole country for the better part of two years [note to people just emerging from a two-year-long coma: nothing like this actually happened] did more harm than good, because collective government action always does more harm than good, just like it says it does in the Bible.

Also the campaign to get as many people vaccinated as possible did more harm than good [see above], and was an example of Soviet-style totalitarianism, and Woke ideology. [Don’t believe this one? Read the linked VDH piece. I double dare you.]

Something like this was always going to be the narrative, whether the final death toll in the USA from COVID was 20,000 or 4,000,000, because conservative narratives are totally unaffected by empirical reality, since any contact with empirical reality inoculates against conservatism even more effectively than the mRNA vaccines protect against COVID-19.

The only thing that’s missing is long COVID, but that will be revisioned into ‘woke crybabies just aren’t tough enough–and if they were the ‘right’ people, this wouldn’t have happened to them anyway.’

For multiple reasons, conservative thought leaders (such as they are) and politicians decided that COVID was overblown and a liberal plot to undermine conservative politicians, including Il Trumpe. Once that happened, the only way to maintain an internally consistent world view was to downplay the severity of the epidemic–which is still ongoing. So people will continue to needlessly die and become disabled, possibly permanently, because they need to rationalize away their cognitive dissonance.

Same as it ever was, akshually…