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Gripe: Lots of folks are saying that the reason people aren't obeying basic public health recommendations is because public health authorities burned up all their credibility by reversing on the efficacy of masks, exempting BLM protests, etc. But nobody is providing any evidence!
This strikes me as a classic pundit's fallacy, or at least of the bias of the highly educated, hyper online commentariat. How many Americans were even aware at the time of the mask reversal or the BLM "exemption"? Less than 2%?
On the other hand, we have an extremely simple, extremely persuasive alternative explanation for why folks aren't wearing masks, aren't social distancing, aren't cancelling Thanksgiving, notwithstanding the increasingly desperate warnings of the CDC: All of those things suck.
The question isn't whether people saw the disjunction between public health recommendations and the BLM protests. Obviously they did! The question is how much people know about the shifting public health commentary on those protests. https://twitter.com/michaelbd/status/1326971606191771649?s=20
And I'm not trying to exonerate public authorities here! I'm NOT saying that because there is (as far as I know) no evidence that their actions hurt their credibility in a way that impacted public health, they're off the hook. I'm just saying that I WANT TO SEE THE EVIDENCE.
