When the USA is having massive numbers of deaths and severe lasting illnesses, due to refusal to take the safe and effective vaccines and other necessary precautions, this opinion is just not tenable.
It's literally causing deadly disease, at scale. If that's not classifiable as "pathological", then I don't know what is.
Specifically, Dr. Fauci discouraged people from wearing masks, not because there was a shortage and they needed to be saved for front-line medical workers (the real reason), but because - he claimed at the time - they were not particularly effective.
"When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face."
At this point, it is dishonest to characterize Americans' distrust of medical authority as pathological. The distrust is well and truly deserved.
This is factually incorrect. it is dangerous scaremongering to say "the vaccine is useless".
"imperfect" not the same as "useless". This is simplistic, binary, "all or nothing" thinking that should have no place in this discussion. As stated before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699570