Yeah, I pointed this out in my comment - I wish I could say that I think this would have all gone a lot more smoothly if authorities were just honest about things from the start, but I think a lot of the outrage about, say, Fauci lying about masks to try and conserve PPE supplies early on only provided ammo for people who were already going to disregard COVID.

At this point I’m not even sure it matters. The states with the lowest vaccination rates are never going to have vaccine passports anyways. Mentally and culturally the pandemic is over for most people, vaccinated or not.

> Fauci lying about masks to try and conserve PPE supplies

Right. It provided proof that the authorities were willing to lie “for the greater good”. So at that point their statements cannot be seen as truthful but only “possibly good for us to believe” (they think).

And as soon as people accepted that possibility, combine that with their personal estimate of how often “greater good” might conflict with what they personally would consider the actual good of the country or themselves, and you have a situation where many people don’t comply with the recommendations.

Lying to the public is a bad long term strategy for achieving cooperation.

I think most people who disregarded COVID had made their choice before these lies came to light - it just provided justification for them later on. The small town my family's in in the South's COVID response consisted of closing Wal-Mart for a couple of days in March. Most of the people there had made their choice about how they were going to respond to COVID before the mask discourse happened.

But a lot of these people (perhaps justifiably) already viewed media and public officials as perfectly willing to lie to them or ignore their concerns - this extends beyond the pandemic itself and is part of a broader trend of mutual distrust.

I don't know, has it really "blown up in their face," or do people just use supposed examples of "strategic messaging" to support their preexisting commitments? In other words, are people actually changing their decisions based on specific examples where public health officials allegedly lied or used strategic messaging, or are they simply using those examples to justify their own actions?

People's opinion of the trustworthiness of authorities wasn't a blank slate when COVID began. Some people already believed (based on their life experience) that authorities are untrustworthy, and therefore chose to be skeptical of their claims during early COVID. Then examples of authorities lying about COVID/masks came out, which convinced those people that they were right all along. They'll be even more skeptical of the authorities next time.

That doesn't seem to explain how the "controversy" seemed to form almost perfectly along existing partisan lines in the United States, unless you're claiming that the baseline "trusthworthiness of authorities" was already divided as cleanly along those lines (which is not at all my impression). Moreover, I feel like preexisting "trusthworthiness of authorities" is very unlikely to be a good explanation for differences in views on vaccines, because I strongly suspect that people on all sides of these disagreements point to people they claim to be authorities in order to corroborate their views.

> That doesn't seem to explain how the "controversy" seemed to form almost perfectly along existing partisan lines in the United States

Awfully convenient, isn’t that?