Masks are the only way to shield ourselfs from the mollifying effects of government toxoplasmosis

"Those still trying to protect themselves from a threat that the government has condemned them to have less trust in the government, turns out"

I watched the government hamstring itself in response to covid. masks were mandatory unless you didn't want to, vaccines were mandatory except for this one because something about this one in particular is special (the answer, of course, is that conservative babies threw an extra big fit about this one). i watched government officials claim that if a pregnant woman takes the vaccine her baby will be born with a full head of hair, a full set of teeth and eyes that are black from corner to corner. I watched them tell us to stay home, but we have to go to work, and we have to go out and support small businesses, but then we have to go right back home. I watched government officials say that the key to getting the numbers down is to test less, and tell people not to report their positive tests.

But I think the thing that gets me the most, the thing that has eroded my trust in government as an entity able to organize and manage a population rather than just in the bad actors that were in place during covid, is that IT'S STILL FUCKING HAPPENING. The answer to "How did the government handle the pandemic?" is "They haven't yet." We just did covid exactly the same way we did Vietnam: we realized that it's expensive and people don't like it, so we gave up and declared victory.

On the plus side, wearing a gasmask in public is very on brand with the other slow-rolling apocalypses going on. Can't brief in wild fire smoke and tiny metal particulates from cars if you're filtering everything above and below (due to the weird physics of filters) 3 microns.

Disabled people who are still shielding from Covid have far less trust in the government than the general public and are far more likely to believe it handled the pandemic very badly, a survey has found.

Are we in the middle of a counter-terrorism operation that gives the whole country COVID in an attempt to wipe out all those dangerous, disabled insurgents?

To expand on what another poster said, the problem people are seeing with government response is that it was never driven by a desire to accomplish any public health goal, but instead was primarily based on what the Protestant ethos would allow to be proscribed. Oh we actually need people to do things for the economy to stay running? Okay you’re allowed to go and work, but you can’t have any fun.

The only policy available to the us government was based on shame and valorization of work (not workers), so it required that people to forego any pleasure to stop the virus.

As it turns out, morality is not a very good prophylactic.