It’s worth pointing out that: (1) there is always a huge swath of people that will “never” take a new vaccine. It has only gotten bigger since social media all

It’s worth pointing out that: (1) there is always a huge swath of people that will “never” take a new vaccine. It has only gotten bigger since social media allowed the unwashed masses to bypass the old gatekeepers. (2) the top health officials in the USA have all been threatened (death threats against their person and their families). This very likely clouds the lessons they could learn from the past / years. (3) “Hard truths” are complicated and require an audience willing to understand nuance. We have a fractured media environment that frequently doesn’t carry the entire quote and media consumers that frequently don’t click beyond the clickbait headline. We have people en masse trusting their health decisions to superstition who join in chants to fire/arrest/kill health officials. While the mask guidance of Feb 2020 could have been better communicated (it seems clear to me the calculus involved more than what was publicly stated), it also seems naïve to me that simply telling the truth would have solved any of these issues.