[invisible]

Public health is complex, and it's a bit tough for us to "agree" that it's "okay" to have different, looser perspectives on how to manage a pandemic. If 50% of the population decides that COVID-19 is fake and that nobody is actually affected at all, then we would have no power as a society to do anything about pandemics.

[vokep]

Agreed that it is complex and I understand it is a bit tough, which is part of why I think the authoritative perspective should not disappear or be entirely disrespected, but would best be toned down. I would trust the CDC or WHO far more if they demonstrated themselves to be organizations I could trust. To me, that starts with being honest instead of carefully chosen lies expected to be "most effective" at controlling people to do the right thing. I have faith in the long term that this will be learned by these organizations and they will get better, but for now I don't see it as rational to accept at face value anything coming out of them that has any wiggle room of interpretation.

The rest of the population that believes things you believe are crazy, are not crazy, but just working with different information. There's cases of some beliefs which pretty much exclusively crazy people believe (mass gangstalking for example) but that's pretty easy to identify and has very direct correlation with mental health conditions. The way to fix this is to treat people as the rational agents they are and allow them to make their own choices. For now it seems myself and others who question authoritative sources on what reality is, have to almost default to "what the authority says is probably lies" because that seems to be true.