Bad actors leveraged the effects of stigma to manipulate people to thwart public health in a pandemic.
People deliberately spread disinformation, on purpose.
Stigma is a known quantity when it comes to disease, especially infectious disease.
Scientific American - January 6, 2025 The Real Reason People Don’t Trust in Science Has Nothing to Do with Scientists Propaganda works, is the real upshot of a survey showing lingering post-pandemic distrust of science By Dan Vergano edited by Jeanna Bryner “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” said the hot-dog–costumed protagonist of a 2019 comedy sketch, pretending not to know who had crashed a hot-dog–shaped car. In the sketch turned popular meme, bystanders didn’t buy his story. Scientists, and the rest of us, might well follow their lead now, in contemplating November’s annual Pew Research Center survey of public confidence in science. The Pew survey found 76 percent of respondents voicing “a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.” That’s up a bit from last year, but still down from prepandemic measures, to suggest that an additional one in 10 Americans has lost confidence in scientists since 2019. Why? Pew’s statement and many news stories about the findings somehow missed the obvious culprit: the four years and counting of a propaganda campaign by Donald Trump’s allies to shift blame to scientists for his first administration’s disastrous, botched handling of the COVID pandemic that has so far killed at least 1.2 million Americans. Even the hot dog guy would blanch at the transparency of the scapegoating. It was obviously undertaken to inoculate Trump from voter blame for the pandemic. The propaganda kicked off four years ago with a brazen USA TODAY screed from his administration’s economic advisor Peter Navarro (later sent to federal prison on unrelated charges). Navarro wrongly blamed then–National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci for the administration’s myriad pandemic response screwups. Similar inanities followed from Trump’s White House, leading to years of right-wing nonsense and surreal hearings that ended last June with Republican pandemic committee members doing everything but wearing hot dog costumes while questioning Fauci. Browbeating a scientific leader behind COVID vaccines that saved millions of lives at a combative hearing proved as mendacious as it was shameful. The Pew survey’s results, however, show this propaganda worked on some Republican voters. The drop in public confidence in science the survey reports is almost entirely contained to that circle, plunging from 85 percent approval among Republican voters in April of 2020 to 66 percent now. It hardly budged for those not treated to nightly doses of revisionist history in an echo chamber—where outlets pretended that masking, school and business restrictions, and vaccines, weren’t necessities in staving off a deadly new disease.
The most read and shared things I've written are those which criticize the manipulation of logic, the target marketing against safety precautions, the shaming of caution, the pretzel logic against science and justice, and the blatant lies we've been pummeled with in the pandemic.
CIDRAP - Five years later, Americans say pandemic drove them apart - Stephanie Soucheray, MA February 13, 2025 A majority (56%) said the virus is no longer something they need to worry about much, as most Americans have been infected with the virus, many multiple times. When examining poll results through political party affiliations, 60% of Republicans said COVID-19 is no worse than a cold or flu, but 76% of Democrats describe COVID-19 today as worse than a cold or flu.
I think it's actually significant that despite all the stigma, the minimization, the heavy handed PR against disease mitigation targeting everyone, and the full on disinformation campaigns politicizing public health for people with a conservative identity – even after all that, there are 44% of Americans who think covid is something people need to worry about, and that even 40% of Republicans recognize that covid is worse than the flu, and an economic social patterns survey reported on last year had revealed that 80% of respondents were reluctant to visit some places even still.
News-Medical.Net - Older adults’ social patterns shift post-pandemic, study finds Apr 10 2024 In one paper published in February in the journal Wellbeing, Space and Society, 60% of respondents said they spend more time in their home while 75% said they dine out less. Some 62% said they visit cultural and arts venues less, and more than half said they attend church or the gym less than before the pandemic.While that survey was taken two years ago, the most recent survey taken in spring 2023 showed similar trends, with more than half of respondents still reporting that their socialization and entertainment routines were different than they were pre-pandemic. In another paper titled “I just can’t go back,” 80% of respondents reported that there are some places they are reluctant to visit in person anymore.
And the pandemic isn't even over. It's still spreading really well, and people are still dying of covid. And the truth is that injustice and lies are being pushed upon people, in some cases without people's knowledge, and absolutely without the consent of many of us.