Mind you, I'm not claiming that they are justified. Just that pro-vax side of the question is a lot more than "but bars are now open".
Let's say (as an experiment) we know that 10% of people will have life-long problems if they take the vaccine, BUT hiding this fact means that 90% of the population will probably take the vaccine and thus, 'saving' a lot of people. Is it ok to 'sacrifice' 10% for the remaining 90%? (I know the values are less, but the questions is, where we draw the line where we should 'hide' things or not). I still hope the side effects will go away, but after one month, this has serious implications in my life, and I feel betrayed for not being informed on the side effects correctly. And for sure, I will not have any other boosters, no matter what mandates or what else they will come up with, and right now, I am recommending others not to get the booster after my experience (maybe wrong, but my experience and suffering trumps any 'greater good' that may put my close friends/family at risk)
My general belief is that the US's inability to address its public health costs in a utilitarian manner will ultimately bankrupt the country. Just today I was reading about how stanford spent millions of dollars to speed up a genomic sequencing pipeline to more rapidly identify rare diseases in infants (ostensibly, so they can be sent to the NICU). Problem is, those millions could also have been spent on covid patients, or covid reasearch, or heart disease research and cancer research (those are the two things that kill the most people in the US) and likely had a greater total outcome! Babies who survive and make it to the NICU bear tremendous costs on the health system, both in the NICU and throughout their lives. But, people love babies so we're willing to spend enormous, illogically enormous amounts of money to save them.
And I think that the last sentence of your first paragraph is critical: They had accumulated trust over decades, and they set all of that on fire. Was Covid a big enough emergency to make that worth it? I think not, even if you buy the "it's for the greater good that we mislead people" idea (which I don't). I think what they did was short-sighted, even within that moral framework.
All I was saying is that, if you are in that moral framework, it's not killing people with vaccines in order to open the pubs. It's killing people with vaccines in order to save more people. I still think it's immoral, and I think that because they destroyed their credibility they're killing more people in the long run, but I think you significantly mis-stated their actual moral calculus.