No, the fact that people were caught off guard really was a big factor. I think authorities would even refuse to enforce the mandates. The shock factor really is essential to make the whole thing work.

I think they've achieved their goal anyway. The engineered crisis gave an excuse to print money so the economy could keep going for a few more years. And they wanted to jab everyone to flatten the world population curve a little. I don't discount the possibility of nanotechnology injection either.

Oh yeah, it was also done simply to shock people. As is pointed out in The Shock Doctrine, a big psy-op enables the erosion of civil rights over the course of decades, people lose the willpower to fight it because they still accept the basic narrative. The last one was 9/11, which was used to justify national IDs and an explosion of military spending to destroy Arab nations. Many opposed that, but it still went through. It wasn't even imaginable without 9/11.

The current erosion of freedom includes increased censorship, a push for CBDCs, and all manner of engineered crises such as food and power shortages. Especially censorship is hard to imagine without Covid, any company partaking in that would've destroyed their reputation but now it's been normalized. But people would've been more outraged about the other things as well if they weren't exhausted from Covid (the psy-op itself, of course, not the disease). And social cohesion has been eroded so it's harder to unite.