Critics of the United States COVID-19 policy have raised numerous concerns regarding the effectiveness of lockdowns, school closures, epidemiological modeling, masks, and COVID-19 vaccines , all of which were promoted by public health authorities with an almost religious fervor.

Prestigious public health institutions have been caught exaggerating or flat-out misrepresenting the evidence for their doctrines.

Paul Offit, a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, has acknowledged bivalent boosters for COVID likely only provide moderate, short-lived protection from the disease.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has referred to the COVID vaccines as “suboptimal.”

Analyses by University of California, San Francisco, epidemiologist Vinay Prasad, and his colleagues have suggested Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials exaggerated the threat COVID posed to children while a CDC journal regularly published flawed articles drawing unwarranted conclusions about the effectiveness of masks.

Yet, despite the concerns raised by dissident voices, the doubts expressed by individuals such as Offit and Fauci, and the flagrantly unethical conduct of the CDC, there remains a strong contingent of those who still hold that the greatest sin of the COVID era was committed by the heretics who questioned the encyclicals of public health authorities, thus potentially encouraging others to do the same.

A group of public health scholars from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for example, recently published an article in the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open documenting the characteristics of dissident doctors and the “COVID-19 misinformation” they spread during the pandemic.

These researchers define the concept of “COVID-19 misinformation” as “assertions unsupported by or contradicting US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance on COVID-19 prevention and treatment during the period assessed or contradicting the existing state of scientific evidence for any topics not covered by the CDC.” In effect, they proclaim that whether or not an assertion constitutes misinformation is not necessarily contingent upon whether it is demonstrated to be likely true but whether the assertion is congruent with CDC guidance at the time it is made.

Specific examples of COVID misinformation included by the scholars were claims that COVID vaccines, masks, or social distancing were either ineffective or potentially harmful. Other examples, which seemed less about CDC policy and more about maintaining faith in public health institutions, included claims that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab, assertions that the U.S. government engaged in the censorship of dissidents, and accusations that the CDC acted in a dishonest manner.

No matter that prominent public health officials privately discussed a “lab leak” as a real possibility, a cybersecurity agency engaged in censorship , and the CDC acted as described above.

“A coordinated response by federal and state governments and the [medical] profession that takes free speech carefully into account is needed,” the scholars wrote, after alluding to professional discipline and social media content regulation as likely being part of such a response. Without such measures, people might lose faith in the proclamations of public health authorities and the integrity of public health institutions.

Yet, given how wrong so many of these individuals and institutions were during the pandemic, such a loss of faith is likely warranted. There are lessons to be learned regarding the dangers of assuming government agencies and their representatives are blessed with inerrancy. Unfortunately, though, it would seem that such lessons are lost on some public health scholars looking to influence future policy.

Daniel Nuccio is a Ph.D. student in biology and a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute.