A huge component of that was outright lies from the CDC in the beginning. "No one needs a mask" "They might even be harmful" "they require special training" all of which directly contradicted studies they had funded and published from doing contract tracing with SARS, while simultaneously stating they were essential for healthcare workers. All instead of saying "hey look we have a shortage of masks due to some previous mistakes we made which make us look incompetent now, and our healthcare workers need them more."

Public health management 101 in any textbook will tell you that maintaining public trust during an epidemic is THE most important thing they could do.

Don't blame the people that were paying attention and realized they were full of it. I bought my masks in January because it was clear this was coming. They also silenced any debate about the costs/benefits of various mitigations. Don't even get me started on that one. With an R0 as high as it was, even in the beginning, it was clear to me that even with mitigations you were going to see cases surge beyond hospital capacities. (Bringing the R0 down from 4 to 2.1 would have been a great success, and yet... not that effective in a lot of ways.) Flattening the curve also prolongs the pandemic and deaths of despair were inevitable. This made some sense in the beginning to try and stall for time with the vaccine, but must be weighed against the costs, and there was no reasonable discussion of that at the policy level.

I think the perfect example of the mismanagement and corruption of the public trust for the pandemic at the CDC was the initial suggestion during the vaccine distribution scheduling meetings was that minorities should be the first in line for these new and experimental vaccines for “social justice” reasons.

Exactly this. I saw that destroy all trust live in the rural mostly white place I live.

Perhaps it did that too, but more importantly it further solidified government health authority distrust within minority communities because of the shadow of Tuskegee is still fresh in a lot of minds about the government willingness to experiment on minorities under the cover “help”.

won’t someone think of the rural white folk? oh please, ignore the rest of the country to make me feel special!

it’s telling how when rural white folk aren’t treated like the most important group to exist, they lose their minds and decide they need to arm up and revolt

Lol yeah just like those pesky Jews in 1938 Germany right?

That is a “what came first the chicken or the egg?” question. Folks opposed to many of the mitigation efforts would likely describe their attitudes as simply a pushback to what they perceived as an uncharacteristic overly authoritarian approach. Which in a lot of countries people are not just not used to such heavy handed government action. Couple that with very public examples of these same authorities who demanding the compliance and controls then disregarding them…then ice the whole damn cake with contradictory advice and outright lies and you have a pandemic that hard to manage because the folks in charge mismanaged it.