The grand strategy (which as I have said before was neither grand nor strategic) was to lock down the population of whole countries as an interim measure 'until a vaccine becomes available.'

This was a novel (and completely unproven) strategy to defeat a supposedly completely novel virus, on the grounds that no human had ever encountered anything like SARS-CoV-2 before so no one would have any pre-existing immunity to it. But the clue is in the name - SARS-CoV-2 was named after SARS to which it was closely related, sharing approximately 79% of its genome sequence according to this paper in Nature. It is situated within a cluster of coronaviruses, and another Nature paper discussed the extent of cross-reactivity with these including the common cold viruses, and even with other families of viruses altogether. It was somewhat novel, but not unique.

So, policymakers should have been skeptical about the claims made early in 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 would produce extreme levels of mortality. This has consequential implications for the claims that the grand strategy was a success because these levels of mortality did not eventuate. If they were never going to happen, then we did not need to be saved from them.

The deployment of vaccines was supposed to bring about 'the end of the pandemic.' The clinical trials of the vaccines purportedly showed they could reduce symptomatic infections by over 90%.

At the population level, this does not add up. If over 90% of infections were supposed to be prevented by vaccination, and 270 million people in the US population had been vaccinated by the end of May 2023 (out of a total population of around 340 million), then how come there were over 100 million confirmed cases by then, according to Our World in Data? It defies belief that nearly 100 million of the unvaccinated 170 million were the ones infected. Particularly as a study by the Cleveland Clinic showed that on average the more vaccinations people had, the more likely they were to be infected:

It was assumed there would be a consequential reduction in mortality from reducing infections (which in any case does not appear to have happened), but the clinical trials did not show any differences in mortality between the groups exposed to the vaccines and the placebo groups. The orthodox defence is that they were not powered sufficiently to detect any differences as the trial populations were not large enough. But by the same token, we are entitled to draw the following conclusion: the clinical trials did not demonstrate the vaccines' ability to reduce mortality.