I'm glad I'm not completely crazy then, or not yet anyway. I can say for a fact I wouldn't be able to piece nearly as much of this together without the farms cataloging a metric fuckton of data from the start of all this. So many things discussed here that I never hear anywhere else, or months later if I do.
You bring up something that I hadn't considered and hope you could elaborate on. I assumed the reason the CDC (and the feds in general, I guess) wasn't changing their messaging to start winding down the coof hysteria was because they were afraid of the various forces that would be against it (the true believers, the federal dictators, Big Pharma) and, not wanting to be caught with their pants down if the coof spikes again, decided to continue down their existing middle-of-the-road stance. You suggest that it's because the Democrats don't have the capital to call in to rein in said forces and get out of the mess they've gotten themselves into. Can you offer some specific cases of what that might have looked like if they did?
This is a bit complicated to answer, so let me roll back a bit first and provide some baseline info.
It is important to first acknowledge that a lot of internationalist forces saw Covid-19 as their ticket to finally being able to actually push their agenda. Most political forces in the world are aware we are right on the cusp of a pendulum swing, and it will be swinging away from internationalism and towards nationalism. They were, simply put, running out of time. Covid-19 to them was a godsend. A chance to do some authoritarian crackdowns, seed power into places that were looking sketchy, and have the populace thank them for it. This plays into why they pushed so damn hard for covid hysteria on an international level.
Now, this isn't the only reason. Each country has its own multifaceted reasons for why it was pushed. But really, all of it comes down to opportunism. A global crisis of unprecedented scale And you should never let a good crisis go to waste.
With this in mind, let us look back at your question. What are examples of what they could have done if they had the power? Well, on a political capital side it would have been a lot easier to pass their bills. Paying off old debts, new debts, and setting the stage for the people to see they are doing something. That is very important here. If the populace believed they were actually doing something, they'd go along with a climb-down the narrative. For example, the infrastructure bill they wanted to pass would have included multiple small payouts to hospitals and Pfizer itself. These would be trumpeted as having an outsized impact on Covid-19, and thus not only was the government doing well it was doing better than expected.
Now make a couple of dozen examples of that. Now you have a populace on either end of the Covid situation getting together and happy that things are climbing down. The skeptics happy it is finally coming to end and breathing a sigh of relief and the restrictions loosen. The Covidian's happy to know the government worked and all the news is getting good. Any issues of new variants would be quietly swept under the rug or require basic things like boosters, sold now under the guise of "See how well we were doing? Just continue to trust us, its going well!".
Positive messages always sell better, but must be backed by something. And with that, just having the capital to pass their infrastructure bill, you have a way to climb down and reap -reward- for it.