This is risking another rant, but I'll hold. Keeping things short - authorities lied their asses off for the whole pandemic, and this is what (legitimately) des

This is risking another rant, but I'll hold. Keeping things short - authorities lied their asses off for the whole pandemic, and this is what (legitimately) destroyed trust. People are a lot less stupid than usually given credit for - sure, they can't always do the research themselves, but they do know to look around and orient them in complex situations. And it got pretty obvious pretty soon that the official message was not about the truth, but about getting the "correct" response. Which turned out to be a lot less precise and correct in practice. So yeah, now you get people mistrusting vaccines because you can't get them to trust anything. The longer response would be that public institutions should be forbidden to use Simulacra Levels over 1 (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-levels-and-their-interactions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-...)