lol, it might take decades to massage public consciousness for a desired outcome in the state's interest, but it certainly doesn't take that long to get a handle on the actual issues: institutions used up all their credibility on transparently obvious misinformation. It started with the WHO, an organization already hurting in that regard (Mugabe the goodwill ambassador... hard to top that kind of contempt), misrepresenting their Wuhan fact finding efforts. Then you had US politicians calling early efforts xenophobic and encouraging people to gather in chinatown to stick it to the racists, followed by the CDC saying masks weren't effective, before they were, and then weren't - and then double-masking. All while the stats were clearly going screwy, people suddenly stopped dying of anything but covid - the long running influenza tracking efforts were halted (or announced, but then reversed?)... oh, and obviously George Floyd tested positive. Mentions of "herd immunity" were scrubbed from the CDC's site, and the word "vaccine" redefined. So that is what went wrong: you can't expect appeals to authority to work when the authorities have seemingly gone out of their way to present themselves as liars who are trying to manipulate you by any means available to them.