Are you saying that the measures would have seemed more warranted if the phasing out of restrictions had been more gradual?

That seems fitting for something that became a seasonal disease.

Who is "we" in this context? This thread is descended from people complaining about American policies and speculating that Biden is trying to make us into the USSR. The US is not Austria and never had fines for being unvaccinated. Vaccine mandates themselves were never federal and can't be. It's up to individual businesses and schools and what not to decide if they care. The government itself only ever mandated vaccines for its own employees. Lockdowns were similarly never federal and mostly on a city by city basis. Some cities hardly anyone was out on the street ever and in-person services businesses were closed for a long time. In other cities, virtually nothing changed at all outside of maybe a few months immediately after March 2020. Where I live, Dallas had a "lockdown" for like three months. This ended way before Ukraine was invaded.

I mean, the quick shift makes sense with vaccine deployments and the medical community figuring out how to deal with it all happening within a few months. We went from not being equipped to deal with the disease to being equipped in a pretty short window.

If governments were using covid as an excuse to control their population, then I would have expected them to hang on to the rules for as long as possible. Instead, we saw rules change as the context changed. That's generally not what totalitarian takeovers look like