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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/0...
The data seems to indicate you are just wrong. Sorry.
At least I provided a source. You provided literally nothing.
You wrote : "I definitely did meet progressives who thought vaccines were dangerous, but I met many more conservatives that were "skeptical" of vaccines way before COVID."
You are the one that posted personal anecdotes.
Opposing Russian aggression, rape, and slaughter in Europe is now a left-wing thing?
Trump broke one political party psychologically, but it isn't the left-wing one.
People (not all of whom were leftist) followed pandemic protocols because most people are not conspiracy theorists and they considered doing so to be perfectly reasonable in the context of a pandemic. For most people, there was no political angle to wearing masks, social distancing, quarantines or what have you, it was just the Trumpists who made it so.
The government was the one trying to crack down on free speech, banning rap music and other things that gave alternative views. The government was the one that wasn’t allowing gays to marry. The government was the one sending troops to wars that no one cared about. The government was the one who created the Patriot act to strip people of their rights. The government was the one enriching Wall Street, protecting Big Pharma and letting police run around beating Rodney Kings all the time. The government was not to be trusted at all. This was what life was like for liberals in the 80s, 90s and even early 00s.
The idea that the left was supporting government shows you know nothing about how life was like even 20 years ago. Rage Against the Machine famously protested the DNC because both parties suck.
Nowadays if you don’t support the government or believe the CDC or FDA, or if you don’t want to support the proxy war in Ukraine, you’re somehow a MAGA alt right white nationalist. They have really done a number on the entire country.
The vast majority of American leftists, at least prior to the web normalizing political radicalization by virtue of giving a greater platform to non-white and LGBT activism, were at best progressives who might listen to RATM, or might show up to a protest, but still supported mainstream political causes. If they voted, they voted for Democrats. They tended by and large to believe that government had a legitimate social function to fill, was necessary to further progressive causes, and that reform was possible within the system. In the weakest sense, they still tended to support the status quo, even if they opposed specific policies. Actual communists, anarchists or radicals were few and far between. The mainstream left spent decades posturing because they were never willing to go far enough to upset the apple cart of white privilege and capitalism.
But more pertinent to the actual context of this thread and your thesis, most of those leftists also tended not to be anti-vaxx (at least it wasn't a belief explicitly tethered leftist identity.) Your claim that the left was always the anti-pharma group and supported vaccine policies because Trump somehow "broke them" and caused them to betray their ideals is just patently ridiculous. I don't know why you bother calling yourself a "traditional liberal" while pushing the sort of anti-leftist narrative that only exists within a neo-Trumpist view of leftism. Take your false flag nonsense somewhere else, please.
The truth is probably in-between, neither really safe, neither really unsafe.
The vaccines are okay-ish, they have some use, and work against a disease that originally was very violent (and by natural selection and mutations got weaker and weaker), but now with all the mutations that the virus has gone through, not sure it's really good or really effective at all (unless you meet the virus from 5 years ago).
Regarding science:
The leftists are usually against governments (e.g. anarchism, communism), and for the people to decide, and to promote "woke" values.
The pro-governments and rules is more of a rightist trait (supporting police, border control, etc), and to promote "traditional" values.