Who could have predicted a few years ago that when the U.S. encountered a pandemic, the highest ranking public health officials would throw away their playbook for how to deal with a pandemic. It would be as though they forgot everything they had studied for decades. They would make shit up. They would pretend that they knew things when they didn't. They would downplay the risks of the economic shutdown (which they pushed) and exaggerate the risk of COVID. The vaccine manufacturers are hiding the raw data regarding vaccine efficacy. The current big disgraceful thing is that these same powers-that-be want to make sure that we are not getting free flowing data regarding injuries and deaths caused by the COVID vaccine. National Review has recently published this summary of many (but not all) of the failures of U.S. public health officials. The article is "When Science Is Not Science," and here's an excerpt:

In August 2021, Fauci advocated vaccine mandates for schoolchildren under twelve, well after it was clear that this age group had almost no risk of severe Covid-19 disease or mortality. Months later he defended generalized vaccine mandates, claiming they would protect people from becoming infected and passing the virus on to others. But he admitted in a scientific journal article he co-authored that there had always been good scientific reasons to believe that vaccines against the respiratory virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, would provide “decidedly suboptimal” protection against infection that would, at best, last a few months. He made the transmission claims and mandate recommendations anyway, despite data showing that the effectiveness of the vaccines was declining with each new viral variant...

When prominent virologists expressed concern that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 might have been engineered at and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Fauci and Collins helped draft, publish, and promote a letter/article refuting the lab-leak hypothesis, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” on March 17, 2020, in the prominent journal Nature Medicine. The article unequivocally stated “that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Fauci and Collins would repeatedly cite the article as proof that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had a natural origin, as if the article had been published independently of their efforts.

It is as if the U.S. has been led by a bunch of frightened high schoolers who knew nothing about pandemics. Further, the powers that be (including the public health establishment) would make damned sure that we censored all dissent, concocting a false consensus. We're hearing all kinds of rationalization now, including from Francis Collins, but it is woeful and shameful. Most Americans are voting with their feet now and not getting any more boosters. U.S. public health officials have earned this intense disrespect.