[alltheworlds]

> I feel the covid fearmongering by governments, medical companies, medical authorities, and the media has made public discourse in general (let alone specifically medical) even more prohibitive.

The fact that you still call it "fearmongering" with nearly 7 million people dead and how many others with negative long term health conditions from the virus tells you why there is a backlash against anti-intellectualism.

You are certainly not prohibited from challenging the status quo. You know that because there are thousands and thousands of anti-mainstream videos and blogs that tell us viruses aren't real, or covid is just the flu, or vaccinations cause more issues than covid itself, and, and, and....

Engaging in rich discourse happens while scientists are trying to form a consensus. But eventually a consensus is formed and then the outliers who mostly only generate noise tend to get ignored. 1 in 1000000 times then may be correct and successfully challenge the status quo, but mostly they're wrong but convinced beyond any reasonableness that they are not wrong. You cannot argue against all of these people, it is just too tedious, so in the end they just get ignored or stopped from spreading nonsense on certain forums.

[GiorgioG]

My wife was in nursing school during/after the pandemic. One of her classmates/friends (37 year old mother of 3) was skeptical of the vaccines and wasn’t sure she was going to continue the nursing program because they were requiring vaccination. She contracted C-19 over the summer of ‘21, spent 2 months in the hospital before dying. Would she still be here for her kids if she’d taken the jab? It’s impossible to know, but more than likely she would have fared better than she did without it.