> Either way, like someone else in the comments said, these past 2 years have shown us that laypeople are incapable of following active science in real time and drawing reasoned conclusions. Frankly, this is probably true of everyone who is not an expert in the field in question. We need organizations like the CDC and FDA to be much better about their messaging (remember the no-mask debacle? Great way to lose credibility, guys and gals), and we need much better tools to shut down the spread and weaponization of misinformation from the anti-vax crowd et al. I honestly don’t have any idea of how either of those get fixed, however.

These two things are at odds with each other. When the authorities are wrong, contradicting them is classified as "misinformation". If they cannot be contradicted, they are the only people capable of correcting themselves. The results of that will be pretty predictable.