Yes, health authorities can be wrong, but if you want to prevent, stop, or aliemoriate a pandemic, you need cooperation. You can't just have Joe Sixpack decided to not quarantine himself or not wear masks.
Yes, the authority figures can be wrong. Fauci can be wrong. People can die when health authorities make mistakes, whether through indecision or decision. I myself keep wearing masks after the CDC says I don't need to. I suspect historians are going to analyze the pandemic and list a litany of mistakes health authorities made in trying to stop the pandemic.
At the end of the day, who are you going to trust more? That schmuck in a random youtube video, or the doctors that run the CDC?
I think the prudent thing is neither fork of your dilemma, but instead a synthesis of prevailing opinions that is skewed as conservatively (in life preservation terms) as afforded by my personal capacity to save lives by sacrificing leisure.
For Instance, I have been treating covid like an airborne pathogen since the /first/ time the CDC didn't recommend masking, based upon an epidemiologists take on early cruise ship data.
Of course I risked being wrong the whole time, but the cost of my leisure and convenience and income turned out to be worthwhile.
I don't know, who purposefully lied to the people treating it like sheep to be shepherded with confident lies and half-truths?
These organizations have burned through a tremendous amount of credibility by virtue of not being honest about what they did and didn't know. And Joe Sixpack, on the other hand, gained a lot. What are they going to be able to do when he starts using that to peddle dangerous products or make even worse recommendations but now with so much more influence?
There's no fastest way to erode the usefulness of a government than making negligent use of its credibility.
The CDC's own learnings from SARS-COV1 concluded 'probable airborne spread' and the low efficacy of hand washing as an intervention, but somehow SARS-COV2 was totally different.
I feel it is punching down to attribute not wanting to quarantine or wear masks to a 'Joe Sixpack' caricature. The ultra-wealthy and powerful didn't want to quarantine or wear masks either - except they had the luxury of boarding a private plane and fleeing the country, or sailing around on a yacht, etc.
At some point... yes. Otherwise, what's your idea for dealing with people who know they're sick but still go into crowded places? We've had examples of people who knew they were infected trying to board planes for example. If not coercion, then what?
Yes, the authority figures can be wrong. Fauci can be wrong. People can die when health authorities make mistakes, whether through indecision or decision. I myself keep wearing masks after the CDC says I don't need to. I suspect historians are going to analyze the pandemic and list a litany of mistakes health authorities made in trying to stop the pandemic.
At the end of the day, who are you going to trust more? That schmuck in a random youtube video, or the doctors that run the CDC?