[gurkendoktor]

Agree with everything you said, but want to add one more point:

I have made my peace with all of these bureaucratic failures. Maybe a certain amount of contradiction and chaos is part of living in a democracy.

The scary part is that at the same time there has been an authoritarian push to crack down on "disinformation", you know, like the lab leak theory, or the conspiracy theory that vaccination will become mandatory. That has sent my trust from low into negative territory.

[spookthesunset]

Yup. It is kind of a massive engineering failure. Everybody was doing exactly what they were incentivized to do. Everybody thought they were doing the right thing. But combined they drove the train right off the track. There was nothing in place to throw the brakes on and tell society to chill the fuck out. No amount of data or leadership could fix it.

The worst part is anybody who dared point this out was met with fierce vitriol, shaming and general hatred. We were all just expected to fall in line and those who asked questions got shunned by society.

In the first month or so it would have been possible for a good leader to chill things out. But eventually the thing grew legs of its own and nobody could put an end to it. Society would just have to wear itself out and one by one come to its senses. Two years later we are just now truly coming to our senses.

Unfortunately it will take quite some time for this event to be remembered for what it truly was: the first true mass hysteria of the internet age.

[gurkendoktor]

I agree about the engineering failure, but I'm not sure if mass hysteria is the right term. It was messier than that, we also saw a few leaders chilling out too much too early. My favorite: https://twitter.com/billdeblasio/status/1234648718714036229

And if anything, governments have been too relaxed about the origin of the pandemic (which has now officially killed 6 million!), while panicking about other details.