Trust is a two-way street
When fully half (or more) of the population does not trust the medical establishment, that will make the inevitable next pandemic worse than it should be, and will cost lives.
Before I start, let me be clear: I supported reasonable, temporary quarantine orders in order to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus in 2020. I supported the mask mandate in 2020 and 2021, and I was wearing a mask in public before it was mandatory. I may have disagreed with how long some of the quarantine orders or mask mandates lasted, but six years later I still hold that both policies were wise. Remember, there was a whole lot we did not know about SARS-COV-2. It had been just over a century from a brutal influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide - more even than the horrific "War to End All Wars." Caution was wise.
On The Bulwark's flagship podcast on February 17, the hosts mocked the idea that the problem with the government's response to COVID-19 is that they "tried too hard to save lives." This kind of attitude shows that so many on the Left and in the medical establishment simply do not get it and have lost the trust of a large segment of the American people because they are so tone-deaf.
Here is the reality: Government policy in 2020 was always going to lead to more deaths. If we did not act strongly enough, more people would die from COVID-19, but if we implemented quarantines that were too strict, more people would die from deaths of despair. This includes suicide, overdoses and alcoholism, plus the toll depression takes on physical health. But the COVID-19 hawks never want to examine the damage done by quarantine orders that were too strict or lasted too long, the damage to educational achievement caused by closing schools, or the lives lost to "deaths of despair." They only want to congratulate themselves by preaching about how they were saving lives.
The flagrant dishonesty of government officials did not help. Telling people to wear a mask during sex, when every functioning adult on the planet knew that will do absolutely nothing to retard the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus, exposed the "experts" as liars or clowns or both. But we cannot tell people that "hooking up" during a global pandemic was a bad idea, because that would be heresy against the religion of sexual licentiousness. Sexual restraint, in addition to limiting the spread of COVID-19, would also limit the spread of sexually transmitted diseases like Monkeypox.
This is a serious problem. When fully half (or more) of the population does not trust the medical establishment, that will make the inevitable next pandemic worse than it should be, and will cost lives. Dismissing or mocking dissenting voices as people wanting "freedumb" is not helping restore that trust and deepens already existing resentment. As is so often the case, it does not have to be "all or nothing." We can recognize that caution was necessary, but some of the policies did more harm than good and even cost lives. If you want to be taken seriously instead of being dismissed outright, you have to take serious objections seriously, rather than treating skeptics with derision and demanding censorship.