You do understand that COVID was new to everyone and, as such, new information has been learned as we’ve progressed through this pandemic that has caused a shift in course?
It doesn’t have to be because of a conspiracy for new information to direct in a different way. In fact, if despite new information we didn’t adjust, that’d be just plain regressive.
The main problem is changing recommendations without new information, just a new politically driven "right-think." Also, there were several shifts in course that directly contradicted science but virtue signaled the right message at the time. It's very hard to build trust in the government, and once it's lost even the most reasonable requests will be questioned.
A relevant comment I saved but no longer have the source for:
"Closing borders is racist. Two weeks to flatten the curve. Don’t mask. Mask. Stay Inside. Trump didn’t close the borders fast enough! Double mask. Protest crowds are not superspreaders. Trump Rallies are superspreaders. School is dangerous, distance learning is good. Go outside, inside is bad. Dems - don’t trust Trump Vaccines. Biden/Pelosi - we can’t mandate vaccination. Dems - you must trust our vaccines, they are effective. Biden/Pelosi - we are mandating vaccines. No mask if vaccinated. School is good, kids don’t get it. Still mask if vaccinated. School is bad, kids are getting it. Vaccine boosters because they are not as effective as we thought."
Plus of course the "just do this, and it'll be over" (eg. "just 14 days to flatten the curve"), with ever chancing rules and moving the goalposts.
Just a few weeks ago, our government was pointing fingers at denmark, how great they're doing with 85% of population (12yo+) vaccinated, and how we'd be doing the same if we reached those numbers.... two weeks go by, and denmark is implementing new measures due to many new cases even with high vaccinations.
People are basically fed up and are willing to live with the risk. Young people have given up two years of their lives to "save grandma", and they're fed up with that, and just want to live normally. We have record high cases, and instead of "vaccinating grandma", we closed down nightclubs and changed weekly home-testing of kids to mandatory in-school testing two times weekly.... and the reaction? A new protest tomorrow. The testing was said to be to keep schools open, and literally at this moment, they're mentioning remote schooling again.
Nearly everything you mentioned changed because we saw how the policies put in place panned out. Everyone thought that since the infectious period was 2 weeks that locking up for 2 weeks would do the trick, well, turns out that it’s impossible to “completely” isolate and rates kept going up. Should we have just stuck to our guns and celebrated the “end of COVID?” That wouldn’t make sense.
The biggest recommendation that really didn’t make sense was the “don’t mask” one. My personal believe is that it was likely to prevent a run on PPE, but I think that still harms trust. Who knows what will be or would have been more damaging in the long run though. If hospitals couldn’t get masks, staff would have gotten sick possibly causing more deaths. However the lie has harmed trust and could be one of the reasons for our low vaccination rates in the US, causing more deaths. Hard to know what the right call was. I would lean towards not lying being right though.
Well of course, but the society at large, including the media, and most people on here and other social networks act as if the current situation is the actual final truth. I remember the start of covid, when we were talking about single digit total cases in european countries, and a few people ("conspiracy theorists") wore ffp3 masks, respirators, etc. to stores, and they were made fun as "stupid idiots", "conspiracy nutjobs", and that we should believe(!) science, and wash our hands.... then bam, almost overnight, mandatory masks everywhere.
> "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
Same with vaccines... all four approved vaccines here were perfectly safe, until they weren't. The mandates basically forced you to pay for testing unless you get vaccinated, and while all other vaccines need two doses, J&J needs only one, so a lot of people got vaccinated by that, because paying 12eur for tests every 48h to be able to ride a bus to work was expensive... and a 20yo girl died due to the vaccine (blood clots), bringing the death toll for girls under 25 to "1" because of the vaccine and "0" due to covid (with around half of ~2mil population getting infected). And what did people say? "why didn't she take the mRNA vaccine?" Why... because the science, our ministers, doctors and the government said that J&J is perfectly safe... a few days after, vector vaccines only for 50yo+ and those who explicitly request them.
And also... a lot of masks actually dont help at all:
> Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%.
For a year now, people were wearing masks, which let through 97% of (influenza-like) viruses, and that was "perfectly ok" (except in few countries, that mandated ffp masks).
TLDR: If we remove every skeptic (eg. people who wear masks, even though WHO says that there's no evidence masks help, and might even even be worse, if you handle them incorrectly), and then science "changes", and we ban all those, who say masks don't help... who's left?
It doesn’t have to be because of a conspiracy for new information to direct in a different way. In fact, if despite new information we didn’t adjust, that’d be just plain regressive.