[taxicabjesus]

> This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes

I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670

> but ended up sowing distrust.

Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?

[colordrops]

Yes. For example, in the US, they told people to not wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic, saying it wasn't airborne because they wanted to save masks for medical professionals. They should have just said directly that medical professionals need masks, so conserve them, reuse them, donate them, whatever, but anything but lie to the public. It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.

[taxicabjesus]

My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress.

My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs.

The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug - https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...

Washington Post: Remdesivir can help keep unvaccinated, high-risk people with covid-19 out of hospitals, study finds - https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remde...

Why Remdesivir Failed: Preclinical Assumptions Overestimate the Clinical Efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 and Ebola https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21

> It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.

I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China.

U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium - No grants for flu, SARS, or MERS while government pursues 1-year risk analysis - https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... [2014]