With that said, I do agree with the proposal that if a kid has already had covid then why vaccinate them if the general consensus is that the vaccines only provide limited protection for a few months. All for vaccinating high risk people and I am vaccinated against covid with a booster from when they first came out but will not get another booster now that I have already had Covid. Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable. I fully understand the rush to vaccinate adults in the beginning when Delta was raging and we had limited understanding of the virus. Luckily Omicron is dominant now it seems to be much less damaging. This is not to downplay the very real consequences and deaths that do occur still from Covid. At this point in time my whole family has had it and I have accepted it as endemic and moved on.
Flu in the US kills around 12k to 50k per year, with a particularly bad year every few decades getting up to maybe 80k. Omicron killed somewhere between 150k and 250k in the US in less than a year, and that was with free vaccines that were highly effective against death easily available to pretty much everyone who was not a young child.
That doesn't sound like no worse than the flu to me.
Flu numbers typically are a small sample size and extrapolated based on respiratory-like illness admissions in hospitals nationwide.
You know you have to substantiate such a wild claim, right? Nobody is counting patients with broken arms that happen to have Covid as Covid patients.
Let me also point out that this wasnt some grand failure. We were in a situation in which what ever information we could get was really helpful. But you have to be aware, that there is not magic box somewhere that spits out perfect information. All data collection has its limitations, its why we still know very little about long covid. Because getting that data is incredibly difficult, especially at scale.