It is no wonder that people took a position opposite this.
Personally, I was vaccinated the moment it was available to me and I encourage people to be vaccinated. But we're at the point where people are being told to trust the science on vaccinations by the same people lying at each previous step along the way.
The naked power grab under the name of "emergency" has been going on for a year and a half now. A lot of places are just trying to increase their emergency powers where a significant portion of the people have just had enough.
Then there is the matter of preferred treatment for certain groups. Kids in California will be required to vaccinate -- but not the big union prison guards. The major league sports require all their employees to vaccinate -- except the players. BLM gets a pass on gathering, but just living one's life and being able to pay your bills isn't sufficient.
Closing borders was racist. Fauci admitted he intentionally misled people [1]. It was totally natural and totally not even conceivable that it had been engineered or part of a program that intentionally makes viruses more infectious. Masks don't work. Masks do work (even though we now know it to be aerosol, not droplet like the flu). So on and so forth.
It is hard to maintain an air of credibility when you are consistently proving to not be credible.
[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90445 (the source NYT article was paywalled)
Well that's the problem... during an emergency (like a pandemic) there are extreme time pressures to get results. Things like debates, inquiry of knowledge, peer review, etc. take time (and taking time = deaths). I believe that is why people were being told to "shut up". Not saying bludgeoning the masses to blindly accept the bleeding edge consensus was the right route to go, just trying to understand why that was the route chosen in the USA.