When the received wisdom is indistinguishable from the cult mindset

From On Emergencies and on trust by Holly Math Nerd.  Just enough to disagree with to make that with which you agree seem even more credible.  Her main point I concur with entirely.  Many of our most important institutions, education, health agencies such as CDC and FDA, mainstream media, tech companies have demonstrated behaviors and articulated actions and goals entirely inconsistent with our Constitution, with Age of Enlightenment values, and with just basic common sense and empirical evidence.

They have robustly forfeited trust.  I hope they start to function in a fashion that will restore it.  But trust lost is hard to replace.

Yet, I do distrust both “the data” and our institutions sufficiently to refuse to get vaccinated. Why?

For the following reasons:

1. If they truly think that vaccination is the key to ending the pandemic (and not a way to institute social credit scores, say) then the VERY LAST THING they would do is demand vaccine passports. Why? Because the fastest way to cause cases to shoot up would be to socially segregate the unvaccinated and keep them all together, in the same social situations, schools, grocery stores. Vaccine passports are the fastest way imaginable to cause a spike in cases, and the people most likely to want social credit scores are cheering for them the loudest.
2. Our government and institutions are not behaving the way that people who are truly scared of a communicable disease, that they insist even vaccinated people can transmit, behave. From public health officials declaring that mass protests are a public health good to releasing migrants into the community each day at the border to throwing large parties of unmasked people, the rhetoric and the actions simply do not line up.
3. Even very smart people with scientific backgrounds (like Sam Harris) fail to mention natural immunity or break down discussion of risk by age and comorbidity status. If “getting the pandemic under control” were the priority, then “wow, you recovered fully and thus have robust natural immunity—GREAT!” would be something heard daily. Instead, it’s almost never mentioned. Nor are vitamin D supplements, weight loss, or the other factors well within most people’s control that could improve COVID outcomes.
4. The people most intensely eager to reshape society are the same people most eager for more lockdowns and stimulus payments, more transfer of dependence to the government. From “build back better” to the new promotion of UBI, this pandemic has become a rallying cry for changing America in fundamental ways.
5. Dr. Fauci freely admitted to lying to the American public on multiple occasions, and asserts that doubting him is doubting science; and yet people near me still have signs in their yard reading, “Trust Fauci!” This is unhealthy.

I am vaccinated but only because I chose to do so on a balance of probabilities.  Argument 2 is especially compelling, as is Argument 3.  All five are good points which I considered along with many others before I made my decision.

Argument 2 is a variant of Glenn Reynolds's adage

I'll believe that it's a crisis when the people who claim it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.