I didn't even read the OPs post. I was responding to your statement in the context of it being an intelligent decision "at the time".
There were plenty of reasons to avoid it, a few being in my initial response to you.
Either way, it's a personal choice, and there was never evidence to push a mandate. But the biggest issue was the suppression of counter arguments via public shaming, social media banning, and the government colluding with big tech to silence individuals and control the narrative, which court cases like Berenson v Biden and the Twitter files showed actually happened.
There was plenty of evidence, the death rate of the original strains was between 5 to 9.6% . Young pepople were being admitted to hopsitals and ICUS 3-5x the rate of influenza and there were no go solutions at all. The icu's were reaching capacity rapidly. Can you not recall the requirement of more ventilators during the initial surges?
For non-white folks the rate of hospitalizaiton at the start- with the alpha and omicron variants was close to 20%, that was crushing the whole system, everywhere. Once you thrown in 60+ with comorbidities the death rate climbed dramatically. For example non-whites had a near 40% hospitalizaiton rate for the alpha variant.
Throw in the fact that long term complications like myocarditis are higher from just getting covid and that vaccines showed clear efficacy in reducing death (quite dramatically in fact) and severity which gave hospitals time to breath and it was an obvious intelligent choice. People up here could not get surgeries or into the ICU as it was full, it was like a zombie plague at first.
As time went on the variants mutated (thanks to evolution) into less virulent strains and vaccination roll outs quelled the surge. You then have revisionists (which you seem to be) seemingly forgetting how bad it was.
So without the vaccine which needed to be rushed and without foresight (it could of became even more lethal) on how the virus would go, you thought it was intelligent to potentially allow hospitals to be overrun, people die from minor issues as the care wasn't there and for it to run amok at a 5-9.4% death rate, never mind the things like myocarditis in young men in particular.