Not_Who_U_Think, the dynamic involved with your friend is something that I really detest the Left for exploiting in their grab for power: the trust people have placed in institutions.
Like it or not, very few of us eschew our faith in every single societal and governmental entity. We all have something that we have held onto, a cultural anchor if you will. Not everyone is like our fellow Freeper cgbg who has never trusted any “experts” (well, perhaps he did if he flew in an airplane designed by them...:) because almost everyone has something, some kind of “sacred cow”, a cultural touchstone.
For me, it was the military structure and culture. And I never questioned the FDA or CDC. I should absolutely throw the FBI in there too, though I have never had any of their activity bear directly on me as the military and associated health departments have. In the other cases, I had far closer experience of interaction with both in my military career and health care career.
Sure, I had lots of issues with those entities, but none cast those entities as irredeemably untrustworthy. I thought they could be worked around.
The Left has not only made those problems worse, through both intentional action and incompetence, but far, far worse in my mind, is the fact that they have openly and malignantly exploited those problems in their efforts to amass power and control.
They have turned many citizens against them with the woke military policies in the case of the military, and the vaccine policies in the case of the health related organizations.
And now, they have co-opted medicine, and turned healthcare providers against their patients, which has accomplished two things: First, it has institutionalized not only bad, but malignant healthcare, and Second, it has turned patients against their healthcare providers.
They have destroyed what remained of the doctor-patient relationship in their quest for power and control.
Some years back, the head of the SEIU (a particularly evil, odious, and repellent man named Andy Stern) made a statement while they were in the process of forcing a major non-union hospital to unionize, promised to destroy the relationship between the patients and their doctors to make this happen.
I was horrified at the time, but since then, have seen that this is the way Leftists function. In their Alinskyite modes of operation, all that counts is the goal. The ends totally justifies any means, no matter how cruel and immoral.
This is puzzling to many people, how healthcare providers could refuse to administer safe and effective early treatment drugs like Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine, and therefore, result in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
It puzzles me, even though I understand it.
I heard a physician in California state that they were informed that any physician using these safe drugs to treat COVID-19 faced revocation of their license to practice medicine. He pointed out that it isn’t like losing your job. If you get fired from a job, you can always go work somewhere else. If you are a physician and you lose your license, something that can take up to twelve years to attain, you cannot go anywhere else and make a living.
This is what they do. The Left has deliberately corrupted, co-opted, and weaponized these cultural anchors such as the military, police, FBI, CDC, etc. in order to destroy institutions and alienate people so that they can exploit that and build their own malformed structures on the ashes.
And they do this, manipulating, depressing, alienating, damaging, and even murdering good, decent, trusting people, who are, in the end, just so many eggs to be broken in the making of their tyrannical omelet.
And that realization fills me with furious anger.
The only reason I ever trusted airplanes is I carefully looked at their accident rate.
It was amazingly low over many years.
I was never taking any “experts” word for it without verifying the numbers for myself.