I suppose, in a very grotesque way, he’s actually correct.
He’s an American, and in the US, the first lockdown was of limited effectiveness because a lot of idiots refused to cooperate and most places did little to force them to cooperate. The results were better than nothing, but it didn’t go well either. From an absolutist perspective, it didn’t work.
Things have not changed - if anything, “covid fatigue” has made things a little worse. Some people still won’t cooperate, and they won’t meaningfully be forced to. Some people will be a bit more reckless than they were before, especially if they and most of the people they know have been lucky so far. In that sense, it won’t work this time either.
From a non-absolutist perspective, those who know better aren’t excused from restricting the damage which stupid people do, even if what they can do is limited. Engaging in basic anti-pandemic measures still does something even without full participation, and every life saved matters. Even the lives of the ungrateful idiots who are spreading chaos and death and are not only insisting that it’s not really happening, but also they’d have the right to do so if it was.
We do need to eventually find a way to more effectively contain them, though. If not for this plague, then for all the future times when something goes wrong on a global scale. “Let’s let them Darwin Award themselves” isn’t a great idea when they sometimes kill and/or do a lot of harm to other people first, and then not even always die themselves.
TL;DR If your standard of “doesn’t/didn’t work” includes “not nearly effective as it could be/should have been”, then it’s sadly true. That standard is a bad one to use when it comes to human lives, though.
