I’m genuinely curious: What other subjects have become so saturated with misinformation, contradictory messaging, institutional reversals, half-truths and people confidently talking out of their asses that society eventually just…gave up trying to understand them? Not because nothing is known. Because the information environment became so polluted that “who the hell knows anymore?” became the default response. Nutrition seems like one. Climate change, maybe, for some people. But SARS-CoV-2 may be one of the strangest examples I’ve ever watched unfold in real time. We somehow went from an enormous global scientific effort producing an extraordinary amount of knowledge to a large fraction of society concluding that it’s gone, it’s mild, I’m immune, we have to live with it, and nobody really knows anything about it. That is a fascinating…and terrifying….epistemic failure.