Poking my head in as a physician that is also frustrated with some of the reporting on this topic, it's worth noting that a lot of the reporting seems earnest,

Poking my head in as a physician that is also frustrated with some of the reporting on this topic, it's worth noting that a lot of the reporting seems earnest, but loses context when the person translating 'expert talk' into 'layman talk' isn't qualified to do that translating, and loses some nuance. For instance, referring to your list of "lies": 1. Early on in the pandemic it was highly questionable what the value of masking was. We had mixed experiences to go on: on the one hand, even N95 filtration seemed to not be overwhelmingly effective in stopping viral passage in the laboratory, on the other hand we'd had previous SARS breakouts where universal cloth masking had stopped outbreaks. Neither of these things is "false", they're different facts that needed to be incorporated into a single world-view. What has emerged over time is "masking works, both by reducing the rate of transmission and by reducing viral load - the latter mechanism enough to decreased morbidity, mortality, and symptomaticity rates. It doesn't work by outright stopping viral transmission." "Evolving worldview" isn't the same as "lying." 2. Infection fatality rates were >5%. Important note: there are open and closed case rates. Open Case rates are cases that haven't "ended" yet, either by recovery or death. Closed cases are for those that have. When your population under study is accumulating new cases at an exponential rate, at any given time the majority of "open" cases are early in the disease (and thus haven't died or recovered yet), biasing the IFR downward. At the same time, it means the bulk of cases not destined to end in death are delayed into the future compared to those that end in rapid death - so the closed case IFR is biased upward. For a while we had open case IFR <1% and in a number of places closed case IFR >30%. Early in the course of the outbreak in the US, during the first wave before things skyrocketed and our hospitals went to capacity, our open case rate was ~3% and closed case was around 12%. The more we juggled stats, the more it looked like the 'true' rate was going to be around 4-6%. Again, how these rates evolve over time as we improve detection, management, and treatment doesn't change that this was true at the time. - Immunity via vaccination and immunity via infection are not the same thing. You can develop an immune response that isn't super effective (e.g., targets a highly non-conserved region of RBD, or was adequate at producing antibodies that provoked macrophage activity but not effective at viral neutralization.) Or you can develop an immune response that isn't long-lasting. The vaccine, on the other hand, is designed to target a highly-conserved region (so it's cross-reactive across many sub-strains, which it is); it's tested for the production of neutralizing antibodies (which it does); and it's given in two doses to ensure a better lasting response by intentionally provoking the development of additional memory cells. These things are different. You falsely equated them, and thus determined one of them must be a lie. I don't know about, for instance, the ebola thing. Not a paper I read. If I were to be generous, I'd say "reporters fail to convey the nuance and context that helps people make sense of apparently contradictory information." Because that's most of what I'm seeing in your post: attempts at making sense of the world, but without enough information to succeed at doing so, and identifying the gaps in your knowledge as 'lies' rather than ignorance.