Why?

> Why?

Locking people down at home for over 2 years. Damaging an entire generation of young children in the process.

Destroying the economy in the process. Inflationary policies which lead to recessions and stagflation globally from which we still haven't recovered (and probably won't for the next 5-10 years).

Spreading mass fear and hysteria based on little empirical (and often contradictory) evidence.

Obliterating global travel and commerce.

Forced global-scale campaigns on live, involuntary human experimentation. Get the jab or stay locked up. Get the app or forget about going to work today.

Forcing people to wear thin pieces of cloth over their faces for no reason.

Silencing any critique and punishing any forms of noncompliance with heavy fines and incarceration (Djokovic is a threat to national security and public health).

Normalizing "asking difficult questions" as something only "conspiracy theorists" would do.

Installing anti-democratic laws and mechanisms which subvert the individual's right to free speech, gathering, movement, and control over their own body.

Bullshit and twisted statistics arbitrarily used as excuse for random decisions.

This list is far from complete...

I don't remember most these things happening in the US but maybe you live somewhere else. In hindsight there were a ton of mistakes, but I do remember there being mass graves and overworked medical people WHILE there was a lockdown so some of the irrational things probably make sense.

Rather than being an issue of "institutional trust" it's an issue of a deep and continuing disagreement about the correct trade-offs to make in the face of a novel and quickly evolving situation - and one in which nobody had a crystal ball.

Many people who are far from the levers of power would disagree strongly with your above portrayal. It's an issue that divides people more than an issue where the masses were hoodwinked by an elite with ulterior motives.

In addition the policies while they may not have matched what was necessary where in and of themselves a form of communication to get people to take it seriously.

There might not have been a reason to make everyone stay home, but if the only way you can get people to take a quickly evolving situation seriously is to over correct, then that is the tool you have to use.

By making the same rules apply to everyone and having such extreme responses it reduced the ability for the majority to say "yeah, its bad but it doesn't apply to me". By making everyone wear masks, it was the only way to get the people who really needed to wear the masks to do so.

The policies were extreme because the situation was extreme. People now have the hindsight, but I have lost at least 3 family members and 5 neighbors due to covid and the secondary effects. 4 of those died of ordinarily treatable causes (heat attack, pneumonia, etc), but the health system wasn't able to provide them the treatment needed because of Covid was overwhelming them.

Fauci himself admitted last week that a lot of the policies he pushed for had no science to back them up. “They just kind of appeared” to paraphrase him. However when he was challenged on the science of those policies during that time, he called it “an attack against science.”

No wonder no one trusts the government anymore.

You're just listing a bunch of things that you happen to disagree with using very charged language. I'm guessing that you would object to the characterization of the riots following BLM protests as an reasonable reaction to institutional systemic racism?

Belief in democracy requires that you assume that most people are acting in good faith. Perfectly intelligent people have sensible, non-malicious reasons to come to conclusions that are opposite of yours.

And the obvious and rational response to such things would be to believe in, then purchase premium fungii that can "provide the oxygenation of the whole body, mental power, muscle tone, sexual energy, and immune function", some even come with extra "masculine energy". Makes sense.

Because if you are honest and tell people they only have to wear a mask if they are sick, nobody would wear a mask.

Among other errors they overestimated the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine, said it stopped transmission when it didn't, didn't consider measures to mitigate the risk of myocarditis in young people, and claimed contracting Covid didn't provide immunity equivalent to vaccination.