An analysis piece from the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, titled “A less deadly virus now doesn’t validate skepticism from 2020,” argues:
The pandemic has changed. The virus has changed. But, for many people who have scoffed at the danger posed by the virus since it first appeared here 2½ years ago, their rhetoric hasn’t changed. And now that the omicron BA.5 subvariant appears to be less deadly, they’re pretending they were right in dismissing the risk or the need for preventive measures all along.
I’m not aware of very many people arguing that omicron, by virtue of its being less deadly, is a vindication of their previous opposition to draconian lockdown measures. The actual argument from prominent anti-lockdown voices like Ron DeSantis — whose “ham-handed effort to cast his opponents as disconnected from the realities of the pandemic” Bump cites as evidence of this phenomenon — is that initiatives like school and business closures were never justified, regardless of the dominant strain of Covid in question. There’s an enormous amount of evidence for the Florida governor’s position. Bump, tellingly, doesn’t acknowledge any of it.