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It's this. My observations of Finnish decisionmakers, including in some cases direct conversations with them, basically have given me an image of a process where various politicians have, more than anything, just make the problem go away so they can get back to doing what they were planning to do or advance before the pandemic, which typically would be one or several reforms or laws that often were conclusively derailed by the pandemic, either timewise or budget-wise.
However, this then led to varying ideas of what "making the problem go away" meant at various stages; at one stage it was possible to believe that just utilizing restrictions would be sufficient to get back to normalcy, this initially looked promising when Covid numbers dropped low in summer 2020, then when you had new variants you had more restrictions, when those didn't seem to work and looked like harmful for economy (bad! if the economy is bad you can't do your projects and get thrown out!) it was easy to fall for the idea that masks are the trick to keeping people out and about while combatting the virus, when that didn't do the trick it was time to buy into the vaccine hype and believe that would make the problem go away, when the vaccine hype started getting exposed as hype and there was no more willingness for restrictions it was time for more vaccines, then vaccine passports, when that didn't work there were restrictions after all etc.
In the end, the whole process just unravelled, everyone got Omicron, the Ukraine War occupied the national headspace etc. and now there's no masks, restrictions, and almost no new vaccinations, either. Of course they could have done that from the beginning, but once the process got going, it was pretty hard to step off directly - the masks, the vaccines, the passports etc. were all presented as tools for stepping off the hamster wheel softly and indirectly, but of course they then all had their own issues. And as for just doing nothing, well... what if the Long Covid was real? Then the problem would essentially never go away - there would be a permanent constituency of people disabled by Covid and their relatives ready for the blood of the politicians who were to blame, ie. you.
Combine them with an endless amount of Parks & Rec style bureaucracy turf wars (litres of ink have been spilled in the local media about territorial struggles inside the Finnish equivalent of CDC and between the CDC-equivalent and the Ministry of Health, etc., and I've also heard stories about ministers pushing for whatever measures they have that don't affect the operations of their ministry, or alternatively might keep their people safe from Covid) and what you get is less a conspiracy and more a SNAFU.
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