I won't defend the WHO (because they clearly did spread some misinformation at times), but the scientific community at large only changed its messaging because their information got better, not because they got "found out" as liars.
Great success, everybody's fired.
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned" -Richard Feynman
The situation changed, science recognizes this. This is not a case of the original results not being reproduceable!
So it’s all politics. Yet they call it science.
As you said, this has caused immense trust loss institutions worldwide. For good reason. It’s a tragedy.
These sorts of lies by people claiming to "trust the science" were then used to silence & censor people who challenged statements like this, and who challenged the idea that there was no potential long term harm despite all of the evidence showing young males in particular were more likely to develop myocarditis from the vaccine than from Covid.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-data-vaccinated...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/22/politics/fact-check-biden-cnn...
It’s super concerning that you’ve basically given legitimate ammo to the most paranoid of society. This shouldn’t be the case. But now it’s going to be twice as hard to convince the fringes of anything coming from authority of anything.
It is good that science ultimately won out, but I think it will be a long time before institutional credibility is restored.
Why is it inherently bad that the early pandemic guidance had a political valence? Obviously, no one likes to be misled, but the CDC and WHO were making decisions that would affect billions of people in the absence of any US leadership.
Many choices are political and should be. For example, The tradeoff of how many deaths is it worth to keep open schools has no scientific answer.
The problem is when lies are used to misrepresent the science to achieve a desirable policy outcome.
The ultimate reason not to lie is that it undermines social trust and democracy.
Second is the public health aspects of this. They had to say "Do U, V, and W" before the science was clear that those were the correct things to do. (Why "had to"? Because if they said "We can't tell you what to do", first there would have been panic, and second they would have missed a chance to get ahead of it if they guessed right. So they went with their best guess, which is not an unreasonable thing to do.)
But the third thing is politics and reputation. They went with their best guess, but they didn't admit that it was a guess. They wanted everyone to do it, and so they talked like they were certain, even though they didn't have the data to be certain. When some of their guesses were wrong, they took a reputational hit, because they had sounded like they were certain. Then, compounding the problem, even after the evidence started to come in they stuck to their original advice to try to avoid taking the damage to their reputation, and just wound up making themselves look like buffoons. They damaged the reputation of public health for decades by how they handled this.
Covid has turned into a pandemic because it has the unexpected property of most infection being before symptoms show.
No one has a monopoly on scientific thinking. The people whose tweets were "fact-checked" or removed, and who sometimes even had their accounts banned, could say exactly the same thing about those statements they made that ended up being proven wrong.
We shouldn't apply a hyper-critical lens to the statements of every one, except those deemed scientific experts by the established power structure.