Too often, public-health experts assume that the public wants a projection of perfect confidence.

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) reported recently that 28 percent of adults express hesitancy about the vaccine for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella. That number represents a significant surge. Among parents of school-aged children, suddenly, the number believing that the MMR vaccine should be a requirement for enrollment in school dropped twelve percentage points. Forty-four percent of Republican-leaning independents, up from 22 percent a few years ago, said that the decision for a child to receive an MMR vaccine should be left to their parents, not to schools or the state.

This is the adverse effect of public-health officials’ behavior during the pandemic, when our institutions fed us a toxic cocktail of confusion, deliberate manipulation, and outright lying, and also endorsed censorship of contrary opinion.

Upon reflection, the mercy is that those KFF numbers aren’t much, much worse.