Like Fauci with the masks. He knew he was wrong.
I'm old enough to remember when the government confidently asserted that butter was bad, eat margarine instead. I ate margarine for decades. Then it turned out the hydrogenated oil is more or less poison. Back to butter for me. We were told eggs were bad, meat was bad, grain is good. All wrong.
Also I'm surprised the academic integrity crisis hasn't been mentioned yet... The cheating and plagiarism rates are orders of magnitude worse now than pre pandemic and LLMs
You forgot lobbying.
Are scientists working for the government free from incentives to push bad science?
Of course the problem with it all is one general of medicine. The infectious disease specialist stays in their lane and devises an infectious disease solution. I don't think psychiatrists or economists had much of a say in it. I would speculate there are particular populations such as healthy teenagers, who mostly handle COVID easily with near-zero death rate( HEALTHY teenagers).. where these COVID restrictions caused more damage, psychological and suicide, then the COVID precautions themselves... in order to save the boomer population which did benefit.
The other problem, obvious now, is it didn't work. You can't bottle up people, particularly not muricans, a very individualistic culture. The goal was to knock out COVID in a week or two and look how it went.