I know many people having close relatives and friends who are now phantoms living in their imaginations - because they are dead from Covid. Given a second chance, I'm sure they'd prefer to be 'locked down' and alive rather than locked up in their graves.

I'm not buying your premise.

Just to be clear, as there is a "compassionate exception" for experimental cancer drugs, and as there was for early AIDS cases to bypass clinical science, it seems to me that a "compassionate exception" was justifiably made for a world wide pandemic for a novel Coronavirus that science initially did not understand, and is still struggling to understand today. To err on the side of caution in a global pandemic is to err on the side of life over death. Falsifiability and Occam not withstanding.