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I think part of the issue with vaccine hesitancy here in the USA is that people are starting to see for themselves contradictions to what they've been told. e.g., a few months back the state of Texas rolled back restrictions and reopened for business. At the time, they were called Neanderthals for thinking like that. They were reportedly going to kill off a large chunk of their population. But guess what, that didn't happen. Their case counts went down, and they just recently celebrated a day with zero covid deaths. And closer to my home, they up until recently had restrictions on groups of over ten (?) people. Then they opened the floodgates and about two weeks ago I attended an indoor NHL hockey game. The stadium was about half full due to lingering capacity restrictions, but still, half full is about 10,000 people. There have been no reports of increased covid cases from that event.
So people are rightfully starting to ask themselves, "Have we been told the entire truth about this disease?" And once people start coming to the conclusion that government has been lying, at least partially, about some of this stuff then you are going to see more defiance and rebellion to information presented by the government. It's a "loss of credibility" scenario. I am not a government conspiracy nut. I think covid is bad and not a hoax or conspiracy. However, I do think the government (here in the USA at least) took advantage of the crisis to pursue other agendas - to what end, I don't know - and have lost some credibility because of that. And you see this reflected in increased vaccine hesitancy. Which I don't personally think is the brightest way to respond to that, but that's apparently what people are doing. People tend to see things in black and white - "the government was not totally forthcoming, therefore this whole covid thing is a hoax". I don't believe that. My personal opinions: The government was not forthcoming. Covid is bad. The vaccines are good. Masks are helpful in some circumstances, useless in others. These differing thoughts can all coexist. But - you do have to take what the government says with a grain of salt. Questioning is good in this circumstance. People are questioning, "Do we really need this experimental vaccine that the government is pushing so hard?" Is it as safe as they say it is? Do masks really do much?" These are normal (and good) questions to ask when the government has not been entirely honest in the past. The end result is vaccine hesitancy and mask aversion - like it or not.
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