Thank you for trying to give a nuanced viewpoint on this. Public health officials aren’t saints but somehow because there was a pandemic we have to worship them now? Or hate them? There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground.
Easy to forget how much lying and idiocy “both sides” did. The conspiracy theorists may have had crazy theories but they weren’t crazy for thinking they were lied to and/or their fundamental rights were threatened.
In France they wilfully oversold vaccines by saying they would stop transmission. When questioned in Parliament the health minister admitted they had no proof for their grandiose claims. Then the opposite happened because people were told they were invincible with the vaccines, but you couldn’t go to all the “optional” public places without an insanely priced Chinese-made test from less than X hours ago (X changed a few times) or without proof of vaccination, all this on government controlled databases. This also became the standard restriction for travel for around a year, even for going back to your home country… All that and retirement homes weren’t on strict lockdowns for a very long time in 2020, data showing older people were more vulnerable was available early on.
I was paid a lot of money to stick social distancing stickers in public places and there was nothing proving it was of any use: the distancing or the stickers.
A lot of people hated the restrictions because they were hypocritical at best. I couldn’t do remote work and was always forced to work in proximity with others anyway. The government made false promises like no loss of salary for anyone catching the virus, that quickly went out the window, I still lost more than 40% of my salary the month I inevitably got it. I got it before vaccines were available and never got it again (got tested a lot, mostly because I was curious): I was still considered like a plague ridden heretic for not wanting to get the vaccines when they decided to force people to get vaccinated and wasn’t allowed to do sports outside in a club without paying 40€ or more for a test each time. The first lockdowns I still had to work but I couldn’t go for a walk outside more than once a day.
EDIT: oh and in 2020, and until 2022, it was expected to clean and disinfect shared tools and surfaces. Now no one cares! I go through a lot of disinfectant wipes to minimise how dirty my hands get at work, and I shouldn’t have to do one pass to remove the black grime then another to disinfect…
I think a lot of it came from the impact of social media algorithms driving people into increasingly polarised groups such that to prove you weren’t in ‘their’ group you had to fervently believe the exact opposite of everything ‘they’ believed.
Politicians, being politicians, jumped on that and pinned their flags to one group or the other. Meanwhile, health institutions and scientists, not, as you say, magically immune from the influences the rest of us are under, did the same.
But my point is really that they all still just did their job under those circumstances. Not as saints, not as evil masterminds, but as biased, ideologically-blinded, rash, stressed-out, fucked-up, and disillusioned ordinary people. Just like the rest of us.
And some of the ideas coming out of that are going to be fine, some are going to be harmless but annoying, and a few are going to be properly crap. That’s how the world is.
What’s crazy is seeing everything as black and white.
Thank you for trying to give a nuanced viewpoint on this. Public health officials aren’t saints but somehow because there was a pandemic we have to worship them now? Or hate them? There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground.
Easy to forget how much lying and idiocy “both sides” did. The conspiracy theorists may have had crazy theories but they weren’t crazy for thinking they were lied to and/or their fundamental rights were threatened.
In France they wilfully oversold vaccines by saying they would stop transmission. When questioned in Parliament the health minister admitted they had no proof for their grandiose claims. Then the opposite happened because people were told they were invincible with the vaccines, but you couldn’t go to all the “optional” public places without an insanely priced Chinese-made test from less than X hours ago (X changed a few times) or without proof of vaccination, all this on government controlled databases. This also became the standard restriction for travel for around a year, even for going back to your home country… All that and retirement homes weren’t on strict lockdowns for a very long time in 2020, data showing older people were more vulnerable was available early on.
I was paid a lot of money to stick social distancing stickers in public places and there was nothing proving it was of any use: the distancing or the stickers.
A lot of people hated the restrictions because they were hypocritical at best. I couldn’t do remote work and was always forced to work in proximity with others anyway. The government made false promises like no loss of salary for anyone catching the virus, that quickly went out the window, I still lost more than 40% of my salary the month I inevitably got it. I got it before vaccines were available and never got it again (got tested a lot, mostly because I was curious): I was still considered like a plague ridden heretic for not wanting to get the vaccines when they decided to force people to get vaccinated and wasn’t allowed to do sports outside in a club without paying 40€ or more for a test each time. The first lockdowns I still had to work but I couldn’t go for a walk outside more than once a day.
EDIT: oh and in 2020, and until 2022, it was expected to clean and disinfect shared tools and surfaces. Now no one cares! I go through a lot of disinfectant wipes to minimise how dirty my hands get at work, and I shouldn’t have to do one pass to remove the black grime then another to disinfect…
I think a lot of it came from the impact of social media algorithms driving people into increasingly polarised groups such that to prove you weren’t in ‘their’ group you had to fervently believe the exact opposite of everything ‘they’ believed.
Politicians, being politicians, jumped on that and pinned their flags to one group or the other. Meanwhile, health institutions and scientists, not, as you say, magically immune from the influences the rest of us are under, did the same.
But my point is really that they all still just did their job under those circumstances. Not as saints, not as evil masterminds, but as biased, ideologically-blinded, rash, stressed-out, fucked-up, and disillusioned ordinary people. Just like the rest of us.
And some of the ideas coming out of that are going to be fine, some are going to be harmless but annoying, and a few are going to be properly crap. That’s how the world is.
What’s crazy is seeing everything as black and white.