Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He's very perplexed and came to X in hope of some answers. He got them although it is probably not what he expected.
A question for everyone: survey data suggests that by the end of the Covid-19 emergency trust in public health institutions had decreased significantly. If you are among the people who reacted that way, why specifically? I'm hoping for long, diverse, individualized answers.
— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) March 26, 2026
Maybe because public health officials lied about the efficacy of the vaccine, for example.
For me, it was being barred from seeing my unborn child’s ultrasounds (because two in a room is acceptable but three is right out). I was then encouraged by medical professionals to join big, sweaty outdoor protests in the infamous DC swelter because racism is a “health crisis.”
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) March 27, 2026
That'll do it.
Well Conor, representatives of the public health institutions provably repeatedly knowingly lied to the American people about a galaxy of topics related to Covid, called people who had valid questions and concerns about their prescriptions for public safety “irresponsible” and…
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) March 27, 2026
Remember, when they mocked people with questions about Ivermectin as 'horse paste eaters'?
He's going to quote a bunch of you in his hit piece about "conspiracy theorists" you know.
— GigaMeteoryan🇺🇸 (@GigaMeteoryan) March 27, 2026
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Someone who feels even more upset and violated about this all than me is my PhD Chemist wife, who took a lot of the stuff at face value until she started digging into the papers they were putting out and realized they were playing games with “bucketing” of their sample groups to… pic.twitter.com/PX2ssxPnPq
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) March 27, 2026
See, people who 'science' for a living don't like being lied to about data. When you lie to people like that, you lose their trust for a long, long time.
Or the arrows on the aisle floors at the local Walmart as viruses famously follow directions
— D Block (@Dhmcgrath77) March 27, 2026
“Six feet apart” was literally a number they made up so people could feel like they were visibly Doing Something, incredibly black pilling
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) March 27, 2026
Those were the good old days although people giving each other personal space was quite nice.
I come from a family of microbiologists who work(ed) basically exclusively in oncology and infectious disease. The pandemic was a case lesson in experts holding out as authoritative guidance things we knew didn't work (masks, from decades of studies on SARS-type coronaviruses and…
— (((Not That Crown, Maybe))) (@CrownMaybe) March 27, 2026
Because we had public health officials telling us that gathering at church was deadly but gathering at a protest wasn’t, all while politicians like Gavin Newsom disregarded their own rules to go to fancy restaurants.
— Aaron (@_AaronRyan) March 27, 2026
Oh yes! It was fine to burn down cities because 'racism', but gathering to pray for our nation and world in the middle of a pandemic was a huge no-no.
For me, the start of it was all the ridiculous photos we started seeing. Incredibly stupid and pointless, even as we were told by dancing "experts" that the standards were different based on political bias and motive. This is just some of the nonsense:https://t.co/ElPjJny8WC
— Aldous Huxley's Ghost™ (@AF632) March 27, 2026
Perhaps now Conor has some insight into why the medical and science community have a lot of work to do to earn back the trust of the public.