A remark left elsewhere about the lack of trust in our institutions.

The insane part: early on during the pandemic, the “six feet apart, 10 minutes, indoors” message actually got to people. It was simple, relatively direct, and from that you could infer a whole bunch of behavior modifications to keep safe.

And quietly, during the pandemic, I stuck to those rules, and managed (AFAIK, thanks to “asymptomatic COVID”) to keep relatively safe.

But then, as the pandemic rolled on, we started seeing other actions in 2020 that made less sense or which violated the simple rules above. Like closing down outdoor venues–despite a lack of evidence from contact tracing that anyone was getting sick in outdoor venues. Some states even prevented people from going for walks or exercising–which, as it turns out, caused a lot of people to gain weight, and COVID symptoms are harsher for those who are overweight.

We also shut down shopping centers and shopping venues despite a lack of epidemiological evidence for spread at retail outlets–which, given “six feet, 10 minutes” makes sense. (Most of the time I’m shopping, my natural anti-social tendencies tends to put me farther than six feet from anyone unless I’m quickly passing them.)

And then we saw states engage in totally strange behavior–such as prohibiting people from buying gardening supplies in some states, enforced by roping off sections in an otherwise opened grocery store, so to prevent people from going outside and working in their gardens.

Notice the farther we moved away from “six feet, 10 minutes, indoors”, the more grumbling there was in 2020.

Worse, we saw a lot of “rules for thee, not for me”–for example, a small restaurant with outdoor seating in a parking lot in Los Angeles shut down while a massive outdoor dining area was set up by a film company for shooting a TV series, or Pelosi in a hair salon.

That was the final nail in our trust of these institutions, and rightly or wrongly a lot of the disgust at the actions of our leaders landed on the shoulders of the CDC and the FDA–both of whom were also engaged in improper behavior, with the CDC cherry picking data for their MMWR reports (such as demanding mask wearing based on what was, in a sense, a massive sex party in Massachusetts where people were violating “6 feet, 10 minutes, indoors” in spades), or with the FDA basically claiming regulatory power over COVID tests (and completely fucking that up), despite the fact that customarily, testing is the province of the CMS.

(I’m amused, by the way, at the anti-anti-vaxxers questioning my long hair. Thing was, the early report suggesting that getting a hair cut was “safe” came from a study of ONE hair stylist over ONE week–hardly a large body of data, despite the fact that the CDC had access to a lot more data than that. Notice that report came out right around the time our news casters and politicians started looking a little shaggy. Meaning the report was clearly political, having nothing to do with the science.

And if you question other people, notice suddenly how many wives discovered their professional hair styling skills. Had I asked my wife to cut my hair, I think she’d still be laughing at me after all these years.)

One cannot help but think part of the reason was that there was a concerted effort to destroy an economy that under the Trump Administration appeared to be firing on all cylinders. (Of course, one problem with repressing the economy when it seems to be firing on all cylinders–deliberately or accidentally–is that “firing on all cylinders” is usually a prelude to a recession. So artificially slowing the economy was inevitably going to create a bigger dip in the numbers than you would have otherwise seen.)

Then the vaccines started to roll out and we got the twin messages from the Democrats–who were playing the traditional game both parties do of accusing whatever the other side is doing of being bullshit–that the vaccines were rushed and were probably dangerous (so we have to delay their rollout), and that the vaccines were insufficient to help us anyways, even if they were to role out ten years from now, on a proper “scientific” time table.

All of this is not helped by the revelations about the FBI and Twitter that medical doctors otherwise calmly discussing the scientific data gathered by the CDC and by other groups and the implications on everything from school closures to age-related mitigation strategies to probable better policies were deliberately censured if they made any statements that went against the CDC’s published guidelines.

This fueled a lot of distrust, because–quite frankly–the three-letter acronym groups in the Federal Government: the CDC and the FDA–acted in ways that appeared to violate scientific principles, while the FBI worked to censure any discussion that ran counter to government edicts–even going so far as to shut down any discussion of the limitations in the CDC MMWR reports, even censuring people who did nothing more than post data from the CDC web site, which constantly evolved to hide data easily calculated that did not support the government’s recommendations. (For example, noticed the projected age-related IFRs were removed from the CDC’s web site as more data came in and the number fell well below the 3.3% IFR estimates given early on. If the 3.3% IFR estimates were correct, we’d see around 10 to 20 times the number of deaths in this country in 2020 alone.)

The problem is, because all these groups acted against what the science seemed to be telling us, many groups who were inherently distrustful of the government basically took the message “the government was dishonest with its data in forcing policies not supported by science” and turned that into “science is bullshit.”

And once you get to “science is bullshit”–a message which feeds nicely into left-wing or right-wing populism (which is a political notion–not even really a philosophy–that the “elite” are distrustworthy control freaks who deserve to be destroyed)–then you get into all sorts of behaviors that either ignore, or deliberately violate, expert opinion.

The stupid part is I knew–and said two years ago we’d land here if the CDC and the FDA continued down this road of distrust, fueled by the additional distrust garnered by the media who did what the media always does: takes a disaster and ramps it up to 11 by finding people willing to feed the “HALF OF YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!!!” narrative.

Without trust in our government institutions, we got conspiracy theories about 5G microchips tracking people for the New World Order.

So all of this–the growing right-wing authoritarian movement who is borrowing from the far-left authoritarian movement’s tool kit, the growing distrust of medical advice and refusal to take vaccines (which pre-date COVID, by the way, but has been turned up to 11), the growing power of left-wing and right-wing demagogues (Trump being the canonical example of the demagoguery shit-show)–all of this is a result of the trust the CDC and the FDA and local officials lit on fire at the start of all of this.

The really REALLY stupid part: had the CDC simply stuck with “6 feet, 10 minutes, indoors, and masks help prevent the spread”–and just reasserted this simple message, along with “slow the spread” to mitigate peak hospital capacity, along with showing the CDC doing everything it could to assist in providing emergency hospital capacity while the FDA stopped meddling in testing in an effort to grow its power when it doesn’t have the capacity to do what it is already doing–none of this would have happened.

Because sometimes simple, easy to understand messages backed by full scientific transparency is the best path.

But instead, our institutions decided they wanted to control rather than educate. And control never works in America.