This bucket is going to take a very long time to refill

Remember the insistence that the [Covid-19] virus was primarily spread by droplets that quickly fell to the floor? During his recent public hearing, [Fauci] acknowledged that to the contrary, the virus is airborne.

Officials didn’t just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them. …

Failure to acknowledge the basic facts of Covid transmission led the authorities to pointlessly close beaches and parks, leaving city dwellers to huddle in the much more dangerous confines of cramped and poorly ventilated apartments. The same failure also delayed the opening of schools and caused untold millions of dollars to be wasted on plexiglass barriers (that likely made things worse) rather than effective air filters that would have helped kids to return to one another’s company.

Beaches and schools are open again, but the most severe ramifications of these failures may last for decades, because they gave people cause to doubt the word of scientific and public health authorities.

If the government misled people about how Covid is transmitted, why would Americans believe what it says about vaccines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should people distinguish between wild conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies? …

Opportunists and “do your own research” chaos agents will take advantage of these lapses for a long time to come, fueling conspiracy theories and bad ideas of every stripe. The newest one I’ve heard is that Covid is ravaging people’s immune systems on a mass scale comparable to that of H.I.V. On what authority can such a falsehood now be debunked?

As the expression goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets, and this bucket is going to take a very long time to refill.

I hope the pandemic, both as lived experience and now as rewritten history, has proved that paternalistic, infantilizing messaging backfires. Transparency and accountability work.

In the four-plus years since Covid emerged, millions of people died, but so did something harder to quantify: the trust of a great many people in the science of public health. The authorities will have to live with the consequences, and so, unfortunately, will all the rest of us.

— Zeynep Tufekci