If someone has a legitimate question it’s batted away with out weighing evidence or lack there of.

From this POV they cannot be taken at face value. The Vitamin D thing or HCQ thing. Whether or not they prove useful, the media would not even consider whether they were useful or not. It was just “NO!” Likely this knee jerk reaction was due to a certain person floating them as options. If Bill G had floated them as he floats his own favorite solutions, the reaction would have been different.

That HCQ might be useful against COVID was widely reported in mainstream media. It was also reported that this was still speculative, but promising enough that tests were starting right away in several places.

We know nothing is a silver bullet, but we also know HCQ is prescribed or was to people going to the tropics and in some of those countries it’s OTC, so then labeling it as dangerous as heroin is kind of disingenuous. Sure you don’t want to dose yourself... but it’s also not as dangerous as they made it out to be.

HCQ may be prescribed by a doctor if you are traveling to an area where it is effective, and where the alternatives either are not effective or there's a counterindication (or where they're too expensive if you're in a health system where that's relevant). You will be warned of the risks by the doctor. It wouldn't generally be available over the counter in developed countries.

Heroin would be somewhat rarely prescribed today (though in some developed countries it is used sparingly as a powerful narcotic pain reliever), but even more dangerous opiates are routinely. You will be warned of the risks by the doctor. Heroin, too, was once available over the counter ('Heroin' was originally a trade name; Bayer promoted it as a non-addictive alternative to morphine).

Specifically, I'm sure their recommendations are all data-driven in isolation, but the overwhelming impression is that there's been no triage based on consideration of what is feasible, in aggregate, for new parents.

The result is that, when you talk with other parents, after a glass of wine or two you all end up admitting that you did all the CDC recommended stuff for a couple weeks, maybe even a couple months, but you couldn't keep it up and you stopped boiling the bottles and you gave him a little security blanket and oh, yeah, he's alive now.

So there are a lot of people out there (including BosWash hispters like my wife and I) basically trained to think of the CDC as an organization that tells you to do a bunch of onerous, in-the-aggregate impossible tasks that you disregard for your own health and sanity.

This is the central dilemma of public health policy and public health messaging everywhere.

I read a fascinating book once about public health messaging.

The gist was, for the health of people, messaging from public institutions has to be extremely over-simplified and made rather blunt, because people in aggregate just won't follow nuanced, "more correct" advice effectively.

But if they overdo the over-simplification, then it's not useful any more.

People who are looking for nuance see that the advice is blunt and over-simplified, and may point out to each other that the institution is giving such advice, undermining trust in it.

So it's a difficult line to walk.

We have seen this recently in the England with Covid-19 advice to the public: It was too complicated, now it's changed to the "rule of six". The former advice was probably better advice if people had followed it, but people didn't follow it, for many reasons. So it had to be simplified into a simple, catchy message, in order to take into account people's reactions in aggregate to the type of advice.

I tend to imagine this is frustrating for well-informed public health scientists.

Even in respected media, journalists try to angle stories from opposite sides. So you’ll have a random person from Facebook take up as much screen time, if not more, as a literal PHD in infective diseases.

It gets worse over time, as the story gets more and more boring. I mean, it basically hasn’t changed in 8 months, but you can’t just re-run information in modern media. So you’ll have days where the top corona virus story is about some social media person getting banned from Instagram for spreading fake news, and not how the amount of infected is exploding in Europe again. I mean, that bit did pick up in the following days, but why was it ever news that some idiot got banned from Instagram?

The first problem is that US governing elites have proven themselves to be corrupt and untrustworthy.

People in the tech sector have not been greatly exposed to this, but wages for the median person have remained stagnant for the past four decades. The elite response has been either to deny the problem or make it worse. People do notice when it gets harder to make ends meet, and the failure to address this problem has undermined faith in the elected arms of government.

Other issues such as the bipartisan consensus to invade Iraq on the basis of fabricated evidence and the fact that Trump has told 20,000 lies about objective matters since assuming office have exacerbated the problem.

The second problem is that conservatives--including conservative media--massively overstate the scope of governance problems in the unelected civil service as an electoral strategy. These viewpoints are amplified by Facebook and other social media in search of engagement.

The third problem is low quality education among the bulk of the population. Critical thinking skills are not effectively taught, much less internalized, by the average person. Most people are not able to effectively evaluate information they are given, which leaves them vulnerable to whatever propaganda Facebook et el shovels into their feed.

I spend time with both elites (academic, professional class, government bureaucrats) and with working class people. I can, anecdotally, tell you pretty easily why there's so much mistrust. The elite class has shifted wildly away from traditional narratives about how the world works, and toward post modernism and intersectionality, while the working class has largely stayed with traditional views.

Those two views are fundamentally incompatible. When working class people hear views that don't align with theirs over and over stated as facts, and often forced on them, they cease to trust the people pushing them. This is why they love people like Donald Trump, he understanding this dynamic and panders to it, using it for his own ends.

Elites are largely viewed by the working class as either out of touch, corrupt liars, or malicious social-engineers looking to erode society. It shouldn't be a surprise that they don't trust them. The sad result is that these people then fall back to trying to find "truth" themselves, and end up with some strange, often dangerous, results.

The candle in the dark is being lost in the west.

Also I think a common thread with people that go for conspiracy theories is a tendency to see the world in black and white. Everything is either 100% good or 100% bad. If the CDC was wrong about something in February then they're always wrong or theres some deep state plan afoot. A politician that tells some lies, sometimes, is the same as Donald Trump constantly lying. There's no room for nuance.