The Covid years shattered trust in ‘official’ sources. Misinformation and deception from public health authorities, the media, and governments across the West eroded faith. “We now live in an informational no man’s land,” argues David Thunder at the Brownstone Institute, “in which every man must fend for himself.”
One of the remarkable features of these Covid years is the amount of misleading and downright false information emitted by ‘official’ sources, most notably public health authorities, government-appointed regulators, and mainstream media. A part of me hankers after the times when I could trust my government and media in a time of crisis. But if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I’d prefer to live uncomfortably in the truth than comfortably in a fantasy built for me by someone who does not have my best interests at heart.
As someone who turned on a daily basis to the website of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention for updates on the Covid outbreak in February and March 2020, I was especially shocked and disappointed by the abysmal failure of authoritative bodies to impartially report the evidence bearing on masking, vaccinations, lockdowns, PCR testing, and other aspects of pandemic policy. My whole faith in the political, media, and scientific establishment, limited as it was, was shaken to the core.
We have been betrayed by the people charged with sharing the best available data and information with us in a time of crisis. We have been lied to and deceived about matters of life and death, such as the risk-benefit tradeoffs of the Covid vaccines, not only by the pharmaceutical industry, but by the people who occupy leading positions of public authority in our society.
Our politicians have sold us ‘solutions’ to Covid that were far, far worse than the disease, and have generally refused to admit to their mistakes, even when they saw the comparative success of regimes like Sweden and Florida that went a very different direction. …
Thoughtful citizens who notice these betrayals now have strong grounds for distrusting ‘official’ sources to tell them the truth, or present the facts in a non-manipulative, impartial manner. For me, and many others, the old idea that you could depend on your government to inform you of the latest science or tell you the threat level of a disease is now dead in the water.
Worth reading in full.
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