Also, the science itself doesn't really work as advertised. There is this book titled "Betrayers of Truth" [1] which I reluctantly recommend on that. The authors are sometimes a bit too harsh (e.g. about Millikan), but I think they have a point overall.
The gutter press has to sensationalise stories to sell the newspapers and get viewers. It's a race to the bottom. A quarter not vaccinated!!! vs 75% vaccinated so far. Guess which one they run with? Let's not forget cherry-picking the science too, and that the media is a massive echo chamber.
There's no problem with science, but like any other industry, it has its own language, which isn't accessible to the average person, so someone has to simplify it. Journalists should not be that 'someone'.
I’m guessing you prefer your scientists to be absolutely right at the beginning right?
> So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?
> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
[0] https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...
The right just took some sound bites and excerpted the rest of the discussion to “prove” that Fauci was lying, while everyone else was rolling their eyes, and still are.
People hear the things that support the story they want to believe, and then ignore everything else that doesn’t support their preferred narrative. You don’t need a PhD in psych to realize that.
The whole thing is also complicated by the fact that science on surgical masks etc. wasn't (and isn't) that clear. During the 2009 H1N1 flu, CDC also recommended against face masks for ordinary people. See this SSC article for more on that. [2]
[1] e.g. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-don...
[2]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t... (Scott, like you, is also sometimes a bit too generous :-))
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fauci-said-masks-not-reall...
Some trivially obtainable evidence from mainstream outlets, for the silent downvoters trying to memory hole these facts.
>Dr. Fauci On GOP Criticism: ‘Attacks On Me, Quite Frankly, Are Attacks On Science’
whereas I'm more into
Feynman: The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'.
War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Fauci Is Science.