But getting there means a huge number of innocent, non-stupid people will die.
What I find to be reasonable comments from me are getting downvoting in a way that never usually happens on HN! Is it me? I didn't think that the HN community would turn so hard against the CDC and basic infectious disease research.
States with lower Covid Vaccine coverage had more deaths.
Technically, are Red States correct that they will achieve herd immunity, by letting their weak die off?
What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.
Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.
We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.
Do you have any references for this? Our understanding of Covid evolved pretty rapidly during the pandemic and as usual hindsight is 20/20.
I have no doubt that *you* are convinced of your statement. I'd just like to understand what data you based your conviction on.
'Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.'"[1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250501225159/https://www.thest...
First, it's not clear that a significant number of people were hoarding TP at all. The best info I've read suggests that the reason for shortages were changing usage patterns: people would have been pooping at work, but since they weren't going to work, they pooped at home. Thus, sales changed from bulk institutional packaging to retail consumer products. The shortage was because the pipeline for retail products emptied, and manufacturers couldn't switch gears and distribute the alternative fast enough.
Second, you have the timeline wrong. On February 29, the Surgeon General told the public to stop buying masks. On March 8, Fauci told 60 Minutes "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask."
Only later, during the week of March 16, 2020, toilet paper panic buying exploded. According to NCSolutions (a retail data tracker), toilet paper sales skyrocketed compared to the previous month. And as of April 19, 2020, almost half of U.S. grocery stores experienced stockouts of toilet paper at some point during the day.
You're Fauci, trying to convince assholes to do the right thing. Go:
You want to allocate resources to where they will have the biggest impact, and you want to ensure you don’t run out of resources for the most critical uses. They were transparent about this from the beginning.
He chose to allocate resources for the contemporaneous crisis at the expense of the trust needed to manage future crises. Maybe you objectively think that was the correct choice, but it's revisionist to claim that that wasn't the choice he made.
See also "Just asking questions."
1. Fauci admitted on TV that he'd been misleading the public about herd immunity numbers. He said he'd painted a rosier picture than reality in order to avoid making the world fear that we could never overcome the pandemic. -- https://thenationaltelegraph.com/opinion/dr-fauci-admits-to-...
2. Fauci admitted in Congressional hearing that the 6-foot social distancing rule was made up, with no experimental evidence. -- https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/06/03/anthon...
3. Slightly more controversially, Fauci misled us by dissembling under questioning by Sen. Paul. By a strict technocratic definition that nobody he was talking to was privy to, he told the truth when he steadfastly maintained that there had been no GoF research. But by the plain meaning of the words, he was clearly lying. -- https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/04/fauci-says-rand-paul-egregio...
I'm not sure these citations are the best, I don't have time to read through all of it, but hopefully it's illustrative.
I see a need to mock and ostracize and to try to twist others' statements and words.
Do you not see that too? If there are better links to support your incendiary phrasing of points, it may help get the point across better. But I'm not sure you can find something that's not trying to misrepresent and sensationalize the issue.
For #1, about herd immunity numbers, consider the below. I don't see any space for interpretation here: Fauci flat-out admitted to changing what he told the public in order to manipulate their (our!) behavior:
In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”
In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
[...]Dr. Fauci said that weeks ago, he had hesitated to publicly raise his estimate because many Americans seemed hesitant about vaccines, which they would need to accept almost universally in order for the country to achieve herd immunity.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.” “We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
-- https://archive.is/20210305032312/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
Regarding #2, this is also pretty clear. Here's another citation, which also seems pretty clear.
The 6ft social distancing guidance enforced in the US during the Covid pandemic “sort of just appeared”, Dr Anthony Fauci, the former White House medical adviser, has admitted.
It was “likely not based on data”, Dr Fauci conceded in a behind-closed-doors session of the House select subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic.
-- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/01/12/anthony-fa...
For #3, I acknowledged from the start that this is more subjective. If we judge solely by academic jargon, then Fauci was telling the truth. The thing is, it's not reasonable to judge solely by that academic jargon when Fauci wasn't talking to fellow members of the academy. He was being questioned by Congress, and one expects an intelligent guy like him to be able to communicate effectively. When speaking to politicians and ultimately to the public, he should be aware of the language he uses.
EDIT: Sorry to jump back into the same post. But I want to emphasize that the root question we're arguing about here is loss of trust. We don't need a mathematically airtight proof that Fauci was lying. I just need to demonstrate that the institution, and Fauci specifically, said things that for reasonable listeners could be construed in ways that destroyed trust. I think what I've illustrated clears that threshold easily.
You might be factually right that the story changed over time. But to me, none of these feel like misdeeds. They seem like reasonable & adequate (outright necessary?) steps taken along a hard road we all faced.
What would you have had Faucci do during #1 & #2?
Americans have already proven they are too stupid for such nuance over the last decade or so.
For me, this comparatively benign explanation of his behavior became much less plausible when the details of the EcoHealth arrangement became public.
I'm not a big believer in the current so-called criminal justice system as a way to establish... well, justice, but I do think that a trial in open court for his crimes - even just the unambiguous perjury - was likely to be healing and perhaps restorative for our institutions of scientific research.
Except that (given the vagaries of the English language) that sounds like they would be "anti-authoritarian", but they're exactly the people cheering on the current authoritarian government.
However, I suspect that the sense of "authority" you mean is more like "expertise", or "intellectual", with a dash of "perceived establishment" thrown in.
(No shade on you for this—like I said, English is frequently ambiguous and tricky to clearly word things in.)
Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.
People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.
The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.
In my life there have been two huge destructions of public trust.
The first was the Iraq war, which could only be the result of either bald faced lies or gross incompetence or both. We blundered into the desert and set a trillion dollars and countless lives on fire and have nothing to show for it. Tons of people across the spectrum knew this was a terrible idea and were silenced or ignored.
The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership. The response was that the Eastern establishment saved itself at the expense of the country, or that’s how it looked to a ton of people all across the country and the political spectrum including myself.
There have been smaller cuts but those are the big obvious ones.
You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Unfortunately these two characters are not reformers. They are vultures. They are frauds and con men dining on the corpse of trust.
I’m not Russian but I imagine that the failure of the Soviet regime and the hollowness of its propaganda did a number on trust over there, and that Putin and his allies are likewise vultures.
What’s interesting about this telling of it is how it reinterprets history. You are complaining about a lack of trust based on, if not an outright lie, an extremely biased narrative. The most obvious missing piece is you don’t mention the auto makers or uaw workers at all. Or that you say “reinflate the housing bubble” instead of “subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed”. We forced banks that did have proper risk controls to take tarp funds and the attached compensation limits against their will and made money on many of the assets we bought with tarp funds.
There is a trust gap, but it’s not some one way problem of coastal elites selling fables to enrich themselves and the good proletariat being duped. It’s at least as much a story of the populace not using critical reasoning skills to understand multifaceted and nuanced issues, which I suspect is not new.
We've had many of these trust-destroying events in the past, before the Iraq war, but their effects were limited. What we didn't have back then, and what I'd argue brought us Trump and RFK Jr., was a world-wide information-distributing machine and a megaphone in every idiot's (and malevolent foreign actor's) pocket. We're here because anger, belligerence, conspiracies, distrust, hatred, and ignorance are being deliberately spread on Internet platforms by 1. adversaries motivated to destabilize the country and destroy its institutions, and 2. domestic idiots who help to spread it (and make a buck off of its popularity).
I used to think that "platforming everyone" was a noble goal, but we're seeing the results.
If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.
The myriad effects of deregulation and massive consolidation that have cascaded in the past ~40 years (fewer companies owned by wealthier people, the destruction of local news, the erosion of norms protecting journalistic integrity, etc) are, IMO, very clearly hugely to blame for the modern state of political discourse. I'm not saying the internet didn't have an effect—it could hardly fail to; it's an enormous change in our world overall—but I have a very hard time seeing it as being more detrimental than these changes in how media companies operate.
Not to mention public officials being fired due to calling it a "mob" as you just did.
Fully agree with the rest but not with this. Pure and simple economic devastation is enough - yes, the Iraq war did a number on y'all... but most countries in Europe didn't join in on that particular shitshow and still got our version of Trump.
Hell I'd say even the 2008 bank bailouts aren't the problem. The uber rich looting the country for all it's worth, that's been a staple of human society, it doesn't mean automated flip to fascism.
IMHO, the true problem rather is that we (i.e. Western countries) allowed unrestricted trade with Asia, in particular China and India - our greedy big corporations swooped in and moved a lot of economic activity providing decent paid jobs of all skill levels there. Production mostly went off to China, service (i.e. callcenters) to India, high-tech to South Korea and especially Taiwan. And there was nothing domestic, other than maybe be a drone in an Amazon warehouse or Walmart (that, in turn, destroyed even more decent paid jobs in small retail!), to provide alternative gainful employment.
That is what destroyed democracy the most - the devastation and the utter ignorance of politicians.
Historically, though, I believe the DoD started it because of the threat of biological/chemical warfare, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrax_Vaccine_Immunization_P...
From 2001:
In Court, it was ruled that vaccination could not be forced on military personnel without a special order by the president. Thereafter it ran into and judicial obstacles (mainly concerning the methods and viability of the vaccine).If the mandates were the problem, wouldn't people hate their employers for doing that, not the CDC?
It's certainly not the first time people have been required to be vaccinated. I remember talking to some people in the military, who were very upset about the COVID vaccine, yet they get so many more vaccines all the time. Why would they be upset about vaccine mandates for COVID out of nowhere, when they get far more vaccines as a matter of course and have for decades?
There's something new in the information space, specifically about COVID and vaccines, and maybe it is such an irrational thing as trying to destroy the CDC because of some employers' mandates for vaccines, because under this all its irrationality, but I don't understand it.
When doctors questioned vaccine safety studies they were mocked and ostracized. Which is the opposite of truth seeking you think was going on.
> Your head is so far up your --- you can see daylight. They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
So, I have trouble anyone is so cocksure about vaccines and the shot rollout and the general response to covid like lockdowns, etc. I hope this is some consensus shaping bot, but in the case it is not and a real human wrote that, I just want to respond.
Your loud, semi-religious devotion to a consumer product is disgusting. Your outrage fuels my resolve.
There are different safety profiles for any drug, not all are equal. The covid vaxxes all have an atrocious safety profile, at least one was pulled in the states after wide distribution, all were experimental in nature and were generally rushed out to market. There needs to be jail time for the scoundrels that ignored safety signals. And on top of that the damn things didn't work and didn't stop the spread.
Beyond that, the vaxxes were publicly funded corporate welfare, there was broad public-private collusion to force people to get it (no jab, no job), there were 1st amendment violations by businesses forcing employees to disclose medical statuses.
You will not listen to reason, there are a million other sus things you all ignore about 2020-2022. I just hope everyone rebukes you and whatever neo-paganism has a death grip on your mind.
Every vaccine safety study was questioned and examined, thoroughly.
Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
We need to pivot to rationality, and away from in-group/out-group analysis. Let's evaluate claims on their merits, not based on who is making them.
Well put
You seem to be doing just what the OP is complaining about. You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
That's not how science should work, at least in a functional system. If only insiders have the privilege of asking "why?", then we'll be forever trapped in orthodoxy, or worse, trapped in authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
No, I absolutely have not. I'm representing what actually happened, in practice.
The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.
Trying to come back and say "that's too perfect, you're trying to establish them as a priesthood" is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do.
All the critique is out there in the open, available to look for anybody who wants to. However, people prefer to be spoonfed stuff in YouTube videos, prefer to imagine a conspiracy oppressing them.
You are spreading an image of the scientific community that is simply untrue and easy to disprove just by looking at what actually happened.
See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".
If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
> If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. If my house is on fire, I'm going to call the fire department, not the grocery store. Expertise and specializations exist! It's not a shadowy conspiracy by mustache-twirling "elites" trying to make science into a priesthood.
It doesn't matter who you are--if you have a rational, scientific, rigorous critique of some established science, you publish it, and it survives discussion debate, you are part of the "scientific community."
Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance.
My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.
Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?
If you want to critique them, then please do! But please do it with honesty, rather than saying "I hate those nerds and they seem like elites" merely because they spent a lot of their life trying to understand biology.
That's not at all what I said. The privilege you seem to be reserving for the scientific establishment is that the rest of us should accept their pronouncements without question. The implication of your prior statement was that "The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety and this should be sufficient for us to follow without challenging them."
If they actually have scientific expertise to back it up.
Dropping that qualifier means you have to answer, forever, to every crank with an axe to grind, and treat them as if their criticism is just as valid as that of someone who's spent their life studying what you do.
Your* ignorance is not as valid as my knowledge, and I'm sick and tired of people acting like it is.
*: not "you" personally; the general "you"
Like one specific polio-vaccine that very rarely can mutate into a contagious variant [0]. Or one vaccine for chickens that had some rather serious overall issues [1]. Or that some of the Covid-19 vaccines, hastily developed, were rejected by some countries, while other Covid-19 vaccines were accepted by those same countries.
And vaccines demand a huge amount of trust. Vaccines can be abused in lots of ways by governments, organizations and individuals [2]. This is extra unfortunate, considering the huge potential benefits of some variants of vaccines. Vaccines also require trust in competence and public control [3]. For urgency reasons, standards and checking of vaccines were lowered during the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines are also often administered to healthy individuals, not merely sick individuals.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease
> Because vaccination does not prevent infection with the virus, Marek's is still transmissible from vaccinated flocks to other birds, including the wild bird population. The first Marek's disease vaccine was introduced in 1970. The disease would cause mild paralysis, with the only identifiable lesions being in neural tissue. Mortality of chickens infected with Marek's disease was quite low. Current strains of Marek virus, decades after the first vaccine was introduced, cause lymphoma formation throughout the chicken's body and mortality rates have reached 100% in unvaccinated chickens. The Marek's disease vaccine is a "leaky vaccine", which means that only the symptoms of the disease are prevented.[12] Infection of the host and the transmission of the virus are not inhibited by the vaccine. This contrasts with most other vaccines, where infection of the host is prevented.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
> The fact that the CIA organized a fake vaccination program in 2011 to help find Osama bin Laden is an additional cause of distrust.[120]
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc...
They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
I remember a very famous cancer researcher who destroyed his career by not disclosing these relationships:
https://cancerletter.com/the-cancer-letter/20180914_1/
Now, he's on the extreme end because no other cancer researcher has ever gotten quite that much, as far as I know. But there aren't even accusations that he gave favorable results to any drugs form companies that sponsored him, as far as I have every heard, it was merely that he didn't disclose that destroyed his career.
This is a level of honesty and transparency that does not exist in most of society, and we should be proud in the US that science is so clean compared to every other aspect of our society.
And for all the big money, pharma is far far more honest than grifters like those in the anti-vaxxer space who do not disclose how they are making their money, and who do directly benefit from pushing unproven experimental treatments that do not go through the same rigorous vetting that standard pharma does.
Hilariously blinkered.
The political appointees set the overall direction, and so projects come and go -- more or less at the same rate as they do even under the same administration.
Having the President interfere so directly with ongoing operations is unprecedented. Maybe that's a good thing; people wanted a change and they got it. But it's not usual.
This was obviously false during the pandemic when these “health” agencies did what the White House wanted, from the actual “science” to the messaging.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
which is just wrong and further erodes trust.
If in the past they could do 98% of their job without political influence most people would describe that as being free to do their jobs without influence.
If there's now political hacks interfering in 50% or more of their job that's a big change.
If in the past the political hacks were never interfering with THEIR role, just affecting what projects get funded, and now the hacks are interfering directly with them and controlling what they can say or publish - that's obviously new and significantly worse influence.
I have seen articles recently that states China now leads the word in mRNA research, which is the future of vaccine research.
Soon I expect the US to only allow praying over people for medical treatment, we are not far from that with the recent ACA changes.
Communism style solutions ("it is better to have everyone being extremely poor, rather than having some poor and some rich people") is a terrible solution. Trampling on everyone because other group got trampled earlier is not a solution at all.
Presenting insane and deadly pseudoscience as science is stupid, dangerous and will kill people.
But claiming that there were no problems whatsoever and no political interference at all is a really dubious claim. This kind of reality denial is unhelpful and further erodes whatever trust was left.
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
Capital interests own and control both parties, so it's no surprise we are getting results where it's okay to set the meat grinder to high.
oh definitely - that is why I have not commented on this part of article, as I agree that such pseudoscience is simply idiotic, dangerous and will kill people and I am in agreement that it is bad
But this part made me go "really? really? really?" - this kind of reality denial is not helpful either and prompted my comment. And they could phrase it a bit more mildly for far greater accuracy.
I edited my initial comment a bit.
I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:
1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):
> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.
Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.
2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.
I think this attitude, that the work the CDC and other boring agencies do is elitist, or that those who defend it are elitist, is the root of distrust. The fact is that these agencies do the long slogging boring work to establish what works and what doesn’t, only to be undermined in social media for clicks and ad impressions.
The CDC had a very good reputation around the world for the work it did. Since covid everyone on the internet is somehow a health expert and the actual people doing the mountains of boring and thankless work are now seen as nothing more than gatekeepers to the social media platforms.
I’m not familiar with the facts of your anecdote, but clearly the CDC is a government agency and banning protests would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on freedom of speech, you would depend on the Supreme Court to get an exception.
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
These are nice sentiments to have but it does not work in the real world. At a certain point certain problems are too complex for a regular person to understand.
Just say what you mean: you want technocracy or some other non representative or democratic form of government.
Seems more like a well concentrated effort to me.
Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, etc. This has been an organized effort for decades. It's embarrassing how "out in the open" the endeavour has been the whole time, that it can hardly be called a conspiracy.
There's definitely a Science communication problem because Science isn't about who is saying the things, but facts speak for themselves. The reliability, repeatability, and accuracy of what people say is far more important than who they are or where they come from, or whether they live on the coasts or in the "heartland" or whatever.
It's a real problem that there are a lot of ignorant people in the US that cultivate and defend themselves from the "other"--those elite liberals. They make it about identity and in-group dynamics rather than about facts.
The rest of your comment is just flat-out attack against all institutions and government without even considering whether this evil "bureaucracy" is just another mundane structure to administer the boringness of a functioning government.
> I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
I mean, come on. Trump called COVID a "Democrat hoax" just weeks into the pandemic. Pile that on top of thousands of other lies and anti-science bullshit. Trump didn't build the bus that's carrying us off the cliff, but he and his supporters in the media have the gas pedal to the floor. They love people being ignorant and misinformed, and it's disgusting.
Perhaps they could conduct themselves in a way that doesn't make the public hate them? I'm not asking for much here. Only that they do their basic duty as leaders in a democracy to maintain the trust of the citizenry. As an educated elite myself I can't stand their condescension and I can only imagine what levels of hatred I would have towards them if I were the target of it. Basic communication skills are something that every HS dropout car salesman knows, so I don't think I'm asking a lot here for all those elite "experts" in the government with all their fancy degrees to figure it out. You don't sell many cars by acting like you're better than the customer, and you don't sell many vaccines either.
They also furthered the anti-vaxx crowd, which is a bad thing
I think what people don't understand is that effects of the vaccine are smaller than the effects of the actual virus.
It was an accidental leak of a crafted virus from an internationally funded lab. The world was just SOL