As soon as he talked about what he would vote for, and what people should be able to vote for, he was implicitly talking about the greatest good across the population (as measured by voting).
If he had been talking about unilaterally violating lockdowns, then your characterization that he was putting his interests above the life of others becomes fair. But he didn't do that.
As for strategies, he was arguing that he wouldn't want strict borders and strong lockdowns, with full vaccination before opening up. Australia and New Zealand did this. The complex tradeoffs discussion that you remember from the USA was not involved.
In the USA, a weak federal response at the start meant we began behind with endemic COVID. The most we could do was "flatten the curve" - we couldn't stop lots of people getting it. Then with vaccinations we could choose which lives to save. And so the discussions you remember. But that is entirely irrelevant to what he says he wouldn't have wanted.
Related, the fact we talked about lots of stuff didn't mean we were actually thinking very well. For example internal memos about prioritizing "essential workers" was to create some "racial justice" in early vaccinations - they didn't want to only be vaccinating old and mostly white people. And so we prioritized healthy young people blacks and hispanics over people who needed it more. And probably wound up with more dead blacks and hispanics than the "unjust" method. But hey, we got early vaccinations into a politically correct mix of arms!
(In case you didn't guess, I'm not a fan of stupid things done to be politically correct.)
That said, I believe most Democrats would have preferred "doing it right" if that was possible.
If he had been talking about unilaterally violating lockdowns, then your characterization that he was putting his interests above the life of others becomes fair. But he didn't do that.
As for strategies, he was arguing that he wouldn't want strict borders and strong lockdowns, with full vaccination before opening up. Australia and New Zealand did this. The complex tradeoffs discussion that you remember from the USA was not involved.
In the USA, a weak federal response at the start meant we began behind with endemic COVID. The most we could do was "flatten the curve" - we couldn't stop lots of people getting it. Then with vaccinations we could choose which lives to save. And so the discussions you remember. But that is entirely irrelevant to what he says he wouldn't have wanted.
Related, the fact we talked about lots of stuff didn't mean we were actually thinking very well. For example internal memos about prioritizing "essential workers" was to create some "racial justice" in early vaccinations - they didn't want to only be vaccinating old and mostly white people. And so we prioritized healthy young people blacks and hispanics over people who needed it more. And probably wound up with more dead blacks and hispanics than the "unjust" method. But hey, we got early vaccinations into a politically correct mix of arms!
(In case you didn't guess, I'm not a fan of stupid things done to be politically correct.)
That said, I believe most Democrats would have preferred "doing it right" if that was possible.