Easy answer: people care about policy, not facts. They will grab onto facts that support the policy they want, and push away facts that don't. The more politici

Easy answer: people care about policy, not facts. They will grab onto facts that support the policy they want, and push away facts that don't. The more politicized the issue, as with COVID, the more fearful they become that any doubt or nuance will cede ground to the "other side". And they're right in the sense that the "other side" is doing the same thing. For example, every news headline about the pandemic had one of two policy subtexts: Democrat subtext (we need to mask up, lock down, vaccinate), or Republican subtext (we need to open up, drop mask rules, etc). Any media article, when reporting on news, statistics, or scientific studies, would always present it in one of those two contexts. So any new piece of information would be evaluated and presented by the media and by Twitter, not on a basis of how it contributed to our knowledge and evidence-based decisionmaking process, but on a basis of which policy position it seemed to support. And of course, humans love to form political factions and fight each other ("my" group versus "theirs"), and powerful/rich people gain lots of power/money from this process by leading or feeding one side, so the media and political ecosystem encourage this dynamic.