Fallibility versus Bad Faith

To state the obvious, our institutions are not infallible.  They are made up of human beings, and they make mistakes, especially when acting on incomplete information.

COVID is an obvious case. There can be no doubt that our scientists made many mistakes.  They were uncertain how it spread and encouraged hand washing and surface cleaning, which turned out not to be a major form of spread.  They discouraged congregating in outdoors events, which later proved to be safe.  And they did not immediately recognize the importance of masks. They may have focused too much on halting the spread, resorting to lockdowns, and ignored the lasting social damage such actions could cause. They may have taken too much of a one size fits all approach, not recognizing that so densely populated a city as New York may have different needs from a more sparsely populated area.  And when the vaccine came out, they seriously overestimated its efficacy, believing it was 90% effective in preventing infection, which soon proved to be false.

Our right wing media and leaders point to each and every one of these mistakes and use them to claim that they were right and scientists and mainstream media were wrong all up and down the line.  But guess what. COVID was a completely new virus that never existed before.  Expecting our scientists to know everything about it from day one is completely unrealistic.  And yes, I get that it is frustrating to receive a torrent of ever changing advice, focusing on hand washing for a time and denigrating masks, and then later focusing on masks and denigrating hand washing.  But such is the nature of learning on the fly. As for vaccines, the usual practice is to test a new vaccine for five years before approving its use. Certainly if that had been done in the case of COVID, all its limitations would have been learned and matched with appropriate instructions by the time it came out.  Which would still be at least a year from now.

And while right wingers crow over every mistake that scientists and mainstream media made and take it as vindication, somehow they never mention their own mistakes along the way.  Like that COVID did not exist at all.  Or that it was a Chinese bioweapon.  Or that it was no worse than seasonal flu. Or that it would all disappear in April. Not to mention any number of completely nutty claims about vaccines and possible cures.  But somehow all of this either gets dropped down memory hole or is still claimed today.*

Much the same applies to denunciations of the FBI investigation of Trump for possible Russia ties. The FBI knew that Russia was hacking the DNC server and releasing the results through Wikileaks in a manner calculated to cause maximum harm to the Clinton campaign. They learned that a low-level Trump campaign staffer might have gotten advance notice. So the FBI suspected that there might be a channel of communication between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence and began to investigate that possibility.  Ultimately, the investigation determined that no such channel existed, although it did uncover quite a bit of scandalous behavior by the Trump campaign with respect to Russia.  The conclusion by the right wing was that  no such investigation should ever have been launched. In other words, counter intelligence investigations should not be launched unless the investigators know in advance that the investigation will be successful. That's not how investigations work.  

By point of comparison, Congressional committees endlessly investigated Hillary Clinton's role in the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi in hopes of finding some misconduct that would sink her election chances.  No such misconduct was found, although it did turn out that Hillary sent State Department e-mails on a private server. How many Republicans would apply the same conclusion there -- that the committees should never have launched their investigations unless they knew in advance what they would find?

Much the same applies to right wing criticism of the Trump/Russia scandal. I will concede Republicans some points in advance.  The Steele Dossier ultimately turned out to be worthless.  Once it was published, a whole lot of Trump critics (myself included) were all too credulous that there was a well-developed conspiracy. There can be no doubt that media coverage went fairly far down the rabbit hole, speculating about what sinister things lay beneath the surface. It also over-interpreted some things that were visible on the surface. It turned out that there were no sinister Russian machinations behind the change in the Republican platform to remove a call for sending lethal weapons to Ukraine.  Jeff Sessions meetings with certain Russian diplomats were wholly innocent.  And so forth.  Right wingers tout all these things in order to demonstrate that the whole thing was a hoax and the mainstream media went off the deep end.

They prefer to ignore some of the genuinely scandalous things that the mainstream media managed to uncover.  Like that Trump's son and son-in-law met with Russian operatives offering "dirt" on Hillary.  Or that Trump had operatives trawling the dark web looking for Hillary's missing e-mails, unconcerned that they might be dealing with hostile spies.  And so forth.  

Still, right wingers do have a point when they complain that from the Trump election until the Mueller Report, the mainstream media went down the rabbit hole and spent way too much time pursuing conspiracy theories. How dare the MSM trespass on the right wing media's territory!

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*Not excusable are some of the things that scientists said on genuinely political grounds, such as discouraging masks as ineffective in order to save them for healthcare workers, or encouraging Black Lives Matter protests after denouncing anti-lockdown protests. These things deserve to be criticized as political and unscientific.  I just question some of the critics' standing to complain about anything being politicized.